Seeing Sounds

The doctor said I'm half blind this morning. I expected some bad results, that of course is why I scheduled the appointment. I haven't been able to read for a while. He said my eyesight is progressively getting worse, that I would be blind in nine months at this pace.

I walked to school from the optomologist with my headphones on, and I said nothing when I got to class. I looked up braille in third period and poked holes in my notebook paper to practice in the back of class. To think that I could read in so many languages but right now all of them look like the Voynich Manuscript to me, it would be insane.

During lunch, I scrawled through one notebook after another writing all of my stories and ideas down, as fast as I could. I wrote clearly, I could tell by looking at the neat gray lines of fuzz on the paper, but I couldn't read them at all. I took out music sheets and started decorating them with notes until it seemed impossible to play, thinking of all of the hardest pieces I could. For whatever reason, the music was clearer in my eyes than anything else around me.

I went to the school's theater after school, and looked around with my eyes wide open. The room looked torn apart and rustic, like it fell out of a history textbook. The walls were gray and run down with water, with a grand piano shining under the dust from the hood of the stage. Red curtains hung down on either side with clear age to them, held open by golden ribbons tied up in the rafters. I wanted to draw the picture so badly, so desperately, before I would lose the ability to look at my drawings, before I would create art but never know what I've created, so desperately. I'm fifteen and I'll be blind next year.

I shuffled to the piano and sat down, trying to play one of my own pieces. This piano hadn't been tuned in such a long time, and though I was hitting all of the correct keys, they wouldn't sound or would be too flat or make muddled hums, or be damaged by some sticky orange sandpaper that I had no idea what the purpose was. So I put my headphones back on and played Chopin's Op 64 No 2 in time with the tutorial. And in the music I could the sight of blood trickling down my arms, around my fingers and dripping from my fingertips and sinking into between the keys. And I heard the sight of blood dripping from my eyes, down my soft, portrait built face, falling onto the base of my neck and down my chest. And when the song ended, I switched to Balakirev Islamey, and I heard the wonderful image of thousands of sheets of glass falling to the ground, each one with their own particular glare and their individual distortion of the light that came before it, the distortion that came before it. And as they all fall to the ground, they all shatter into smithereens and little freckles of glass speckle the air with the glowing of sunlight. I hear the sight of my psychotic mind, I hear what it sounds like to be insane, and to be so completely sane at the same time. And the song ends, and I hear Chopin's Etude Op 25 No 11 in my ears. I hear myself falling into the abyss, into the Hell that Dante pictured so many hundreds of years ago, and demons grabbing onto my body and pulling me lower until I'm shrouded in darkness, and I'm stuck in this eternity of torment, where I can no longer draw the beautiful pictures that I have for so many years, or write the same words that I used to, and I'm meaningless besides the music that slides from my fingertips onto this piano, burdening me with the constant bombardment of images in my mind, images that I can hardly bear because I'll only be able to remember and never be able to truly know again. I'll have sights in my head to haunt me, remind me what I used to be see and what truly gave life to me. I remembered the Portrait of Dorian Gray, how somehow everything that kept him alive in any way was slipping away like water through his fingers, through my fingers.

I walked away from the piano with my eyes closed.