Grieving Glasses

Prowling confidently through the darkness, my right foot lands and I stop.

“That’s not the floor,” I think to myself while a drop of horror swells from deep within as the painful realization of what just happened blooms.

I feel the cold twist of metal pressing against my foot.

I’m amazed and relieved that my foot isn’t full of sparkly splinters. 

I suppose the lenses didn’t break because the metal is so mangled they lie flat now.

My right foot tells me all I need to know. The glasses I was so delighted to find during a trip to Venice, Italy in 2020, have passed on.

———

I can’t help but laugh at the Universe’s games.

Even when the game results in a $600 pair of glasses bent and twisted underfoot.

(When I say “the Universe,” I don’t believe that the Universe is some all-seeing, omniscient entity that flips a coin and blesses or breaks your life accordingly. 

You. Me. The Universe. We’re all made of the same stuff and come from the same place. The energy you “put into the Universe” is your intention, attention, and energy channeled in a specific direction, which brings a reflection back to you, often with a few splashes of unpredictable fuckery thrown in just for funsies.)

As returned to many times in these Whimsies over the past 19 months, most recently in A Tale of Two Septembers, life in my weird, forested, bass-infused world has been in long stretch of releasing old chapters and identities, an inside-out rebuilding, and the gradual, deliberate, intentional process of becoming the person and building the life I always knew was possible for me, but could never quite grasp.

I haven’t half-assed this process.

I didn’t stop when I started feeling better.

I’ve gone through every chapter since birth, searching, feeling, and releasing.

Seeing that inner work show up in random moments, like breaking the glasses I bought when I was in the thick of The Wizards of Wordcraft, at the beginning of what would be a very painful next five years, is a fun example of how the world can move when you’re fully in alignment. Everything that isn’t, often fades away.

I take care of my things. I rarely drop or break anything. When I need something, I invest in the version I want most, cost irrelevant within reason, knowing it’ll last.

But these glasses were chosen by an old version of me. The “searching for home anywhere but within, bodybuilder and fitness coach-turned copywriter” guy.

Not who I am today. Not the half-feral feline pirate mermaid steeped in bass.

Thus, the glasses too must fade.

(They’d admittedly escaped scrutiny amongst all my purging and restyling, which I find amusing given they sit on my face all day every day.)

So now I feel like Harry Potter, for the new glasses I’ve chosen are ten days away, and I’m left wearing a bent and kinda-sorta unbent pair until then.

If you see Hermione, please tell her I’m looking for her and her oculus reparo magic.

With love from the cabin,

~ Alexander