Sienna skies

“Yes, you will be ok”, said the man.

Double Vision by Michelle Spiziri

Earlier this year, I was in a terrifying skiing accident that left my vision impaired for several weeks. I knew something had changed when my body hit the cold hard ice. In a split moment, a careless mistake, my world became a million fractured fragments, tilted, jarring and distracted. I remember thinking “oh shit”, as my head bounced, one, two. When I heard myself screaming, there came a hand on my back from an unknown man. I still do not know what he looked like, because I could not see his face. Some people may call them angels, so I guess the bodiless voice that hovered over me that dark cold night might have been mine. In truth, he did not save my life because I was never in any danger of losing it. What he did was perhaps far more profound.

You see, as my body threw my head against the ground, darkness snapped and whipped me blind. Fear took over, pain left me stunned – I was broken. There was nothing in that moment that could have been possibly good about the situation. I broke my eye socket. I could not see. And my head felt like exploding. But what I remember of it is not the pain, not the deafening fear that kept me shaking for three hours straight, but the unknown man’s breathless voice repeating “You will be ok, yes you’ll be ok”.

When I returned home from the hospital that night, I could not forget his voice. What I was left with though, was a world altered. My left eye was misaligned with my right. I suffered from extreme double vision. A person’s face had 4 eyes, 4 noses, 4 mouths, 2 heads, sometimes half a head, sometimes no heads. The ground became a jigsaw puzzle, stairs became a sloping disgruntled hill. The world became a reinvented painting I could no longer grasp or understand. For all intensive purposes, all I saw of the world no longer applied. I could not walk because the ground kept changing beneath me and the space in front seemed to be running away, one way then another, then around and around again. I could not catch the images because I no longer had the ability to hold them.

What I remember of the next few weeks was a strange strength that grew from coming face to face with my greatest vulnerability. When the world strips you of the very basic ability to see, you realize somehow you keep on seeing. You make do with what you have. You close your eyes when you need to, but you open them back up when you have to. When the angles of the world are turned and twisted, they reveal to you what lies behind others’ hearts and how different the light catches an every day posture or water glass.

I learned to see that at the moment the world went dark, there was a faceless kindness that reassured me. I learned that when you start to think that there is no one here to listen, you find they can recite your fears over and over and over again. I learned it is impossible to not be brave when courage is what makes each of us wake up every morning. I learned of beauty in even an eye patch made of toilet paper pasted sloppily on my face.

If there is anything that this year has taught me, it is that it will be a trying one. Shortly after recovering from my injury, I returned to work and found myself without one. The blow was as hard as the impact of bone on ice. It broke me – again.  And just as I felt the ground running away from me once more, I was caught by a gentle voice.

A faceless man came to tell me of a fact I cannot deny. He said I would be ok.

And I am.