“Beyond or within?” the doctor asks, flipping the curved glass plates before your eyes, causing the world to warp and buckle.
You know this horror like the inside of your own eyelids, but you don’t think it’s within your comprehension. It’s a dark void within your mind. You see it every time you blink. You sleep beside it at night.
Do you comprehend it? Or do you only know it?
You’re trapped between the apparatus that rests heavily on your face and the high-backed leather chair that cantilevers you upright. There is nowhere to look but through the lenses.
The muscles tucked in the grooves and hollow of your eye socket spasm. A strange pain, like a burning or a weeping, shoots across your nerves. The pain doesn’t have far to travel from eye to brain.
“They look about the same,” you say, hoping that’s the end of it.
The doctor huffs, saying, “Look carefully. Beyond,” flips, “or within? Beyond or within?”
The doctor keeps flipping the lenses. In the convex and concave of the glass, you see yourself. Your eyes unfocus in the garbled onslaught. Your pupils drifting out to the edges, like a magic eye, but in the hidden image there is only more of you.
“Within,” you lie to make it stop. What does it matter really? Beyond would have been a lie as well.
You wait in the lobby while the doctor cuts your new lenses. The frame you picked out was nice. It had flowers around the edge and the nose pads were comfy.
When the doctor finally appears with your glasses, they swipe a microfiber cloth over the lenses and slide the frame on to your face.
“It’ll take a little while for your eyes to adjust,” the doctor warns you.
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