“I’m the most desperate, lonely woman you will ever meet in your life, and I am blind. There is nothing more lonely than blind desperate loneliness. And I want them to feel it. I want them to know my loneliness.”
— K. E. Hansen
In the book you always hoped
to write, your life began with “The End,”
the day you lost your sight,
surgery meant to cure.
Those first weeks, you ignored doctors’
gloom and waited, expecting
any day for your sight
to return, to see again the red
roller coaster near your favorite surfing spot,
the pine green specks
in your boyfriend’s light brown eyes,
the charcoal you were using in your last sketch,
you now will never finish.
But the first time you are left
alone in the darkness you will see
for the rest of your life,
you feel a loneliness so profound, isolation
that nothing twenty-eight years
of sunlight and starlight
have prepared you for.
You feel buried alive,
trapped and terrified, alone and aware
as you will be until the day you die
that the world as you loved it
continuing around you
is gone to you forever.
Frantic at the thought of living
your life through,
you stumble around your mother’s home,
groping for the switches,
turning on every light you can find
with each flip praying
this will be the one.
When you knock over a china lamp,
which breaks apart at your feet,
you begin to cry, tears that tumble
down your cheeks for days,
and you crumble to the floor, screaming
to God, the questions you will ask
again and again, “Why? Why have you
done this? Why have you kept me
half dead?"
