Curly-Q

______The exam room was small, square, and covered with carpet that looked like tweed plucked from a thrifted menswear's blazer. A pleasant woman told me to sit down in a squeaky grey chair to wait until the optometrist came in. I waited for a few moments, observing the clunky optometry devices and an eye test poster with letters that became smaller toward the bottom. Except instead of letters, there were pictures of mammals going from whales and dolphins to lobsters and killifish.



______Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. I greeted the optometrist and we exchanged a few words. Before I knew it, she was rummaging through drawers for a few tiny bottles of liquid.

______"Now I'm going to put these drops in your eyes," the optometrist lady said ever so sweetly as she hunched over me. Her hair was short and fiery. Not losing a second, she immediately dropped a foreign substance into my already light-strained ocular passages. I blinked rapidly and my eyes involuntarily shivered in their sockets like frightened little kittens. She repeated the process three more times, and my eyes continued to weep and quiver after each chilly drop until they were puffy and red.

______"We'll let that sit for a while so you're all dilated," the eye lady said.  She rolled her chair over to a computer, leaving me with nothing more than a tissue to wipe the tears from my poor, raw eyeballs. I dabbed my eyes weakly. There was a strange yellow liquid dappled across the tissue. Blood of the dragon, I thought. I am a khaleesi. I can withstand this hardship.




______And I waited. And I waited. And I began to feel desolation, fear, and all things synonymous with apprehension creeping into the netherlands of my foggy mind. Where is this place, and what is this place, really? I heard voices, but they were not of this room; voices which exchanged cheerful words about scratchy eyes and a green bottle of contact solution. How could a man be speaking outside this square, grey room in such a cheerful tone? This was not a cheerful place.

______The lady swiveled over to me and began the next part of the eye exam. She spun a metal machine over to me and I placed my chin in its curved plastic chin holder. In what kind of place does a chin holder exist? This one, apparently. Directly in front of my bringers of vision, my seers of sight, was a rotating dood-dad that contained a series of lights. No good can come from a rotating doo-dad, I thought. Especially since the word "doo-dad" itself brings to mind piles of doo, piles of poo.

______And so the lights began to flash and rotate around my iris. Some were horizontal blue strips, some yellow and round, and one with a round, red dot in the center, but they all shared a horrendous brightness. Some flashed across my eyes quicker than strobes, and others held my gaze for a bright, painful while. When it was all over, I blinked tears and noticed that the lights in the room had multiplied by three and turned a hazy purple-pink.

______And so it was done, and my eyes were free of obstruction... minus the fact I was unable to see without squinting.



Top: ASOS (exact)
Skirt: Charlotte Russe
Necklace: Charlotte Russe
Earrings: Charming Charlie
Rings: c/o BornPretty
Quartz bracelets: local artisan
Heels: ASOS