Lost Blinkers

CW: Themes of psychological distress and trauma

He went to the opticians. But he couldn’t tell them what was wrong. Kept his fingers crossed and willed them to find a physical defect. Something easily rectifiable. He hoped a new prescription would do the trick. Failing that, he’d agree to surgery. He hated the thought of going under the knife, but sometimes a greater fear triumphed and in this case he was compelled to do something to address the nightmare that was taking a hold of him.

And he was scared. Sometimes scared to death. His fear was growing inside him like a cancerous tumour. Threatening to burst and consume all his healthy cells. He could feel it pulsing malignantly in his mind. But he couldn’t say anything. No one would believe him and that would only make things worse. To announce his madness to the world.

He couldn’t bring himself to believe it, and so the only explanation he had was that he was losing it. Losing his mind. Succumbing to a strange insanity that he must keep hidden at all costs. If people didn’t know, then he was safe. He didn’t want to be carted off and locked up. Pumped full of mind altering drugs in an attempt to numb his already altering mind. Worse still, prodded and poked and experimented on like the frogs they’d dissected when he was at school.

Something itched within him. He called it a worm of doubt. This persistent worm was asking him questions that he would not answer. Could not answer. He just wanted it to go away. He knew it wouldn’t. They were locked in a battle now and he dared not will the worm to die. A dead worm in his head was another horrifying prospect. Rotting in the midst of his brain and taking him with it to another realm.

The opticians saw nothing wrong with his vision. He even asked about it specifically. His peripheral vision. He wanted to know whether that was fine. He got a shrug and a yes. And that was it.

Of course, all the while that he was there, he never once saw anything out of the corner of his eye. This was that annoying intermittent fault that hid when you took the car to the garage. Or called the plumber to see to the boiler. Never was the issue replicated. These things were peculiar to one person and one person only. Special in their selection of a victim. The victim would try to recount the fault. Never finding the words. Gesticulating in a dwindling frustration as they saw how they were being viewed. Shrinking inwards and having to reconcile themselves to a life with a problem that would chip away at them until they could take no more.

Wearing despondency like an oversized cardigan as he left the opticians, he once again, hoped against hope that there would be no further recurrence of the ethereal side vision. He was walking to his front door when it slithered past him. This time, he stood stock still. This time he did not turn his head. But it escaped him all the same. It seemed that he could only see the haunted cloud with the corner of his mind and he did not know how to keep that still. Did not know what there was to be done.

That evening, he found a soft pencil and a few sheets of paper. He sat at the kitchen table and held the pencil to the first paper and attempted to sketch that which was haunting him. Scrunching up each failed attempt and launching it towards the bin did nothing to assuage his frustrations. For want of a natural break he went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. Drank it all and then refilled the glass. Looked down through the water and in doing so, he had an idea. Liked to think that the idea had crept up from the side of him too. An attempt to reclaim that spot by planting flowers there.

Turning his chair ninety degrees to the table he tried to draw again. Barely able to see the paper. Relaxing as best as he could. Trusting the process as he replicated the context of his vision. He made three attempts at the drawing. Rolled his eyes as he looked upon them. Reverting to actions that he knew were doomed to failure. Remembering himself and taking up each of the three pieces of paper and holding them out to first one side and then the other.

Memories were stirred but not with enough vigour to rouse them fully. Further glimpses of something unfamiliar and yet tantalisingly familiar. An elusive conundrum with the promise of meaning. A puzzle that must be solved if he was ever to be free of this madness.

In bed, he lay staring at the ceiling. Willing a further visitation. Adjusting his head gently and then increasingly violently. Trying to jerk the truth of it free from the corner of his offending eyes. Conjuring the images he’d drawn so badly. Trying to think back to that which he’d seen but could never fully recall. As though it were the ghost of an emotion come to warn him of some pending tribulation.

As he drifted towards sleep his eyes shot open. Staring, yet unseeing as he revisited his childhood with his mind’s eye. An illness at a tender age. Bed ridden and delirious. He’d seen it then! The exact same thing had happened to him all those years ago. But he’d never told a soul. Terrified of what may befall him or his father were he to whisper the dark secret.

He was not ill now though. Why now? Why the return of the dark mist that cohered for a fleeting moment only to dissipate into nothingness as though it had never been there?

The answer lay in his past. Dormant and waiting. He let it be. Failing to probe only a few steps further. Few ever learnt from history. They never took the time to listen to the lesson sufficiently.

The peripheral visions continued. A blurred hedge row of warnings as he traversed his life. A testament to the speed with which he took the treacherous corners with no care as to what lay beyond.

When he met her, there was an intangible familiarity to the moment and to her also. This resonance was swiftly swamped and drowned by her exotic difference. He’d never met anyone like her. He was meant to meet someone like her. If he was lucky. If he rolled the dice and got six three times in a row. His insides fluttered and flipped and his mind careened around on a rollercoaster shooting him up with adrenaline until he was overdosing.

In her presence he panted and salivated. Short of breath and overeager. His insides doing cartwheels until they threatened to burst. His desire for her was a raging stallion that he would never tame. She took him to a place he never knew had existed. Made him into something so very different to what he’d been before. She was the escape he’d always dreamt of. He paid no heed to their destination. Anywhere was better than the rut he’d been stuck in.

She came into his life and the ground beneath him shifted and canted. There was never a stable moment. He was running to stand still. Wanting what he could never have, but believing that he already had it.

He did not notice the absence of the visions now. All he saw was her. She was all consuming. Everything else fell away in the passion of an exquisite moment that promised to go on for evermore.

One day he would wake up and see clearly again. Remember the warnings he received as a child. The knock on the door from a concerned neighbour. His father inviting her over the threshold and into their lives. The loss of what once was. Replaced by a chaotic existence that was always blurred around the edges.

Walking away from the man who had once been his father. Blaming him. Carrying a wealth of anger. Standing at the edge of his grave and shaking with a rage of betrayal that he would never find an outlet for.

One day he would wake up far too late and realise he was a mindless player in a game the rules of which he was never privy to. History repeating itself yet again. His insides crumpling as he watched his son walk away. Recognising the aura of hate and anger that was directed front and centre when the reason for it all dwelt at the periphery. And always would until someone broke the cycle and saw things for how they really were.