See with your kiss

My wife is my everything. She has a superpower that allows us to have somewhat of a normal life. You see -ha,- when I was just twelve years old I lost my vision. It wasn’t all at once. Nope. It was a slow descent into blindness. First went my left eye, and then slowly, inexorably, my right eye followed. I knew it was going to happen, but you’re never ready to go blind. Truth is, even if every doctor, eye specialist, and ophthalmologist I have ever seen (see what I did there?) told me that I would go blind, in the back of my heart I always hoped for a miracle. 

I don’t even believe in miracles, that’s how desperate I was. But the miracle never happened, and as everyone had foreseen ( eye am on a roll!), I eventually lost my sight completely. 

But what about my wife, you may ask? Well, my wife came into my life shortly before I lost vision in my right eye. It was a funny way to meet your future wife, to be honest. We were going to the same college and we had classes in the same building. We’d said ‘hi’ to each other here and there, but we never really talked. Maybe the fact that I didn’t see her when she waved at me instead of saying ‘hey’ was one of the reasons why, but I never asked. She probably thought I was a weirdo, and I can’t blame her. At that point I was still pretending I wasn’t blind, so I didn’t carry a cane and I didn’t have a guide dog yet. How did I do that, you might ask? 

Well, I am awesome at pretending I am not blind. Correction. I was awesome at pretending I wasn’t blind. Now it all went to crap. But I digress. 

So, you heard my wife has a superpower… Here it is.

Even on the darkest of days, she manages to shed a light on me. I don’t think anybody can truly understand what it means to live in darkness every second of every day. She does. The only times I see colors, shapes, and brightness is when I dream, but I‘ll have to admit that as of lately my dreams have become more and more about dialogues, sounds and smells. I guess that’s what happens when you start forgetting what you used to be able to see. My wife always jokes around that in my mind, she’ll always look 25, even when she’s old and gray. I don’t have the heart to tell her that her image, too, has faded away and left space for the darkness that envelopes my every waking moment. How I wish I could hold on to an image of her and keep it forever. 

Ask me what her face feels like in my hands, and I’ll be able to describe every ridge and every texture. The softness of her lips, the shape of her eyebrows, and the wetness of her mouth are all things I know how to describe with millimetric precision. 

Ask me what it is like to keep my arms around her and I’ll tell you how her chin fits perfectly on my shoulder, and how my arms were made to hold her and never let her go. 

Ask me what she smells like when she’s freshly showered, or after we’d make love. I could tell you exactly how much shampoo she used and how much she sweated. 

But these are all unnecessary things. Life isn’t meant to be described, it’s meant to be lived and seen. Now, I can only live it. 

The first time she and I talked, it was the third or fourth day of class of her first semester. I had been aimlessly taking random classes to fill the requirements for a general business A.A degree, but my heart wasn’t really into it. Should I take a music appreciation class? Sure. Wanna take a Spanish class? Why not? 

I couldn’t care less about my education, because I knew all too well that those were the last books I’d be able to read on my own, the last slides I’d be able to follow along without my assistive technology. Did I know the exact time in which it would happen? Absolutely not. However, it’s one of those things you simply feel inside. There’s a voice, and even though you have no clue how it knows, it just does and you know to listen to it. 

So, day three or four, I was joking around with some classmates on the terrace in front of my classroom. I didn’t care about my education, like I said, but at least I pretended to care by showing up for class on time. It pains me to admit that I probably wasted a great deal of my classmates’ time on more than one occasion by clowning around with the professors, asking unnecessarily dumb questions and all. But to my defense, I was a 20- year old virgin who was about to lose his vision forever. I sincerely hope they were able to cut me some slack and forgive me. Oh, wait, they didn’t know about either of those things. Still, I like to think that they found me funny and didn’t dwell too much on why I was acting like such a prick. 

When I saw her sitting there alone, playing with her Rubik’s cube, I knew she wasn’t from here. Damn, ain’t nobody that beautiful and that mysterious around school! 

I put on my best smile and walked to her. 

“How fast can you solve it?”

Her cheeks immediately turned red (and yes, this is something I learned when we reminisced about it years later) and she softly replied that she wasn’t that fast, but she could solve it within 3 minutes of starting it. Sounded fast to me! 

It wasn’t until six months later that we talked again, and that was during our first Intermediate Spanish lecture. She must have recognized me as the weirdo with the blue baseball cap (I‘d never go anywhere without it because it saved my face from being smashed against poles and walls on multiple occasions and it became my very first rudimentary cane.)

Regardless of what she did or didn’t think about me, we started talking. And we never stopped. We became conversation partners, and naturally, she asked me if I wanted to prepare for the Spanish exam with her. Up until that point, she’d only seen me in class, mostly sitting at a desk. There, I  could easily play my favorite role, the Seeing student. Should we meet at Starbucks, however, she would have surely noticed. Despite my inner voice screaming at me not to go, and after several attempts at convincing her to come study at my house (“No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, sorry”) I finally gave in and agreed to meet her at Starbucks. 

On the day of our study date I was so nervous I could have chewed on a whole bar of Xanax and still bounced off the walls. My palms were sweaty, knees.. Well, you know how it goes. I was an absolute wreck, and the only way I got to that coffee house was cuz my younger brothers physically dragged me to the car and forcibly took me there. I tried to make up a million excuses, but they weren’t having it. 

When we arrived, she was already sitting there, leafing through the textbook, looking rather uncomfortable. Then again, no such beautiful woman should ever wait alone. My brothers shuffled around a few chairs and organized everything so that I could simply sit down and pretend all was good. I won’t bore you with details on how we learned some useless, silly dialogues in Spanish. I won’t spend any time explaining how I was literally going insane because I was dreading the moment she would find out I was blind. It was clear to me that she would laugh and get up, never to be seen again. After all, her Spanish was already flawless, she had absolutely no need to study with me. In fact, I suspected she didn’t necessarily want to study with me, but who in their right mind would want a date with this blind mess? That’s right, she had no idea. 

I digress, again… My whole point is to tell you about my wife’s super power. There I was, feeling about as useful as a fork in a bowl of broth, and she was talking to me as if nothing was. Yeah, I know! SHE DIDN’T KNOW! I got it. After going over the grammar, we moved on to vocabulary, specifically body parts. 

“Que son los dedos?” she asked me, as flawlessly as could be. 

I had absolutely no clue what a freakin dedo was, so I sat there in silence, looking like a damn deer in the middle of a road.

“Come on, you don’t have to feel bad about it.” 

I was still as clueless as a second ago, I didn’t understand what she meant.

“It’s fingers. I was waving them at you,” her voice in between laughter and slight surprise.  

And there it was. The moment of truth.

“Well, there is something I have to tell you,”I offered. 

“You see…” I never missed an opportunity to make a blind joke in my life, I wasn’t about to miss it then. 

“You see, I can’t see that well.” It was plain bullshit. I could only see parts of her with my declining tunnel vision. Of course I had no idea she was waving her perfect fingers around to help me answer her question! The thought that she’d just get up and leave was so real to me that I nearly stood up to say goodbye. Boy, was I wrong. Not only did she stay, she said: 

“Oh, that doesn’t sound fun. But if you had told me, I would have helped you differently… Tell me more about you see!”

And then we talked and talked and talked, and that’s when her super power emerged and shone brighter than the sun. While I was going blind, she could see. She could see me for who I was, not for my blindness. In her eyes, (see what I did there?) I was just like everyone else, and at the same time like nobody else. It was something I had never experienced before. 

When we called it a day, she took me by the hand and said “Let me take you home. I don’t have a car, but we can take the bus.” 

And that was the moment. That was the moment she became my super hero. Did I know that at that moment? Of course not. I was so busy dying of fear to take the bus that I could barely have any other thought because, you guessed it, I had never been on a bus before, with a stranger nonetheless.

In the nearly forty five years we spent together, her super power became stronger and stronger, adjusting to my needs and evolving as our relationship did.  When there was an obstacle, she’d guide me around it and let me know what it was and where, so I could face it alone the next time. When we went to Rome to the Sistine chapel, she sat on the floor with me describing everything, to the point where I could almost forget I was witness to one of the greatest works of art of the world and I couldn’t see it. When I had to get dressed for the most important job interview, she was there, pairing my purple shirt with my best tie… I could go on and on forever, telling you every single instance in which my wife was there, seeing for me, and seeing me. 

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As I hold her hand, she squeezes it tightly. 

“Oh, Etienne, isn’t it beautiful to watch the sunset together?”

“Yes, my darling, it’s beautiful.”

“Can you feel the sun shine on your face? Look, like this!” I have no idea what she’s doing, but knowing her she’s squeezing her eyes and moving her face slightly closer to the sun. “To get tanner,” she would tell me when we were younger.

With my free hand I find her shoulder and pull her to me. 

“It’s breathtaking, my darling, just like you!”

As I feel the warmth of the sun dwindling, I turn to my wife and kiss her on the lips.