The rest of us.

June 19, Bangor.

Something strange happened to my eyes this morning, out of the blue, and froze me in fear.
We were driving around looking for a grocery store in the little town of Bangor when suddenly a ring of bright serrated lights appeared in my vision, slightly to the right, and wouldn't go away, like a film between my eyes and the world, the ring growing bigger and bigger and finally disappearing but leaving my right eye weak and stretched.
This is my worst fear: everything is going on as normally as it can, you get up every morning and deal with what comes the way you've always done, and then suddenly, you don't know why or how, there is something wrong with you, some disease is there in you that you didn't know even existed, or it is a too well-known one, and your life as you know it is over.  From then on you belong to the ill, the battling, that vast congregation that moves invisible among the rest of us blind jesters, bearing their suffering unsung and quiet, or sometimes a shuffle or a cough, an ambulance siren in the night, bearing on with their weight as best they can, mostly, comfortably invisible to the rest of us in our cocoon of self-confidence and lightness, our fool's paradise.
The ring had faded but left a fiery scar on my psyche.