Contacting Lenses

My contact lenses are driving me crazy. For some reason I can't seem to put them in properly at the moment, so I blink and they move.

Blink, and I'll miss it.

I'm still sort of new to the darn things. I only started wearing them at the really-not-very-tender age of 27. I'd lost my glasses and figured that it was as good a time as any to experiment with lenses. I'd always hated the idea of poking something in my eyeball, and then leaving it there - seems so counter-intuitive. But I'm short sighted, and looks particularly vicious when i squint. And i always forgot to wear my glasses, or avoided it because i thought they looked silly, or they reminded me of the trauma of buying them.

I was broke and half blind and had just broken up with my boyfriend - who had chosen them, because he thought they looked "feminine, but intellectual" - when i bought those glasses. My school paid for them. And they were pretty. Really. Nothing wrong with them. But they felt unlucky. A friend of mine was telling me the other day, as I picked up a penny, that in Zimbabwe nobody picks up money in the streets. Someone may have put a curse on the money, stuck the bad luck in it, ready to be picked up by someone greedy, or thoughtless, or poor. Anyone, as long as it's gone from you. Maybe my glasses were hexed, like Zimbabwean street money...

I mean, they probably weren't. But it just seemed so unnatural a way to see things - through tiny little windows, that fogged and got greasy and that children would grab at when i was a teacher. And i liked the fuzziness of my vision - the prettiness and comfort of not seeing sharp distinctions and lines and features - most of the time. The sharpness of the change between wearing them and not wearing them was too stark and I'd take them on and off too often to ever really get used to them.

So contacts it was, with inevitably ridiculous finger-in-eyeball efforts, SwEnglish cursing and "is it there, or not" moments, which peaked at me having to ask my boss to gaze in to my eye to see if i'd managed to get rid of the whole thing. Charming.

And now, now that I though I had contact lenses down cold, the last stage in my transformation from laden-with-emotional-history trainwreck to someone who is freed from those constarints and phobias, the little bastards seem to be slipping out and disobeying me. I get tired, and they fall out. I cry (I've had a rough week) and they fall out. I try to dispose of them properly and i find them rolled up and dried somewhere two days late, little pieces of incompetence littered around my room.

To top it off, I just received my first ever forwarded email from my college since I left in 2005. It was from the optometrist, calling me for a new eye exam. Nomadic life is ridiculous - of all the letters I may have received at my old address in the past four years, the optometrist makes it through to me.

I'm not getting new glasses - I wear dailies, so even if they're cursed like Zimbabwean pennies, I get rid of them at the end of the day. At least that's something to be said for them.