CNF: Eyeball

by Brianna Neumann

 

When I was a teenager and found out about my eye condition, my eye doctor took the surface X-ray they had taken of my eyeball and drew a little man on it. “Imagine there was a little guy, walking on the surface of your eye,” he said. “It’d be sort of like the moon. Lots of craters, lots of bumps. It wouldn’t be an even plane for him to walk on.”

I know that he obviously didn’t mean this to make me feel bad, just as a visualization, but I felt bad for the little man trying to wobble his way across the surface of my eye. I imagined him tripping, landing on his knees, sticky with eye goo. I imagined the toe of his shoe getting stuck underneath my contact as I slid it on in the morning. I imagined, when I cried, he had to cower behind my eyelid, clutching my eyelashes, praying for the flood to stop.

Years later, when I was an adult, I went to a different eye doctor after moving to a new city and he looked at my eyes for a long time. “You have moderately progressed keratoconus,” he said, which is the medical name for the surface of your eye being bumpy like the moon. “It shouldn’t get any worse if you don’t rub your eyes.” He was a thicker man, five-o-clock shadow, sleepy eyes, a voice like a frat boy. He turned in his little spinny chair to glare at me. “Don’t rub your eyes! I’m serious. I want you to never rub your eyes again.”

I took him incredibly seriously. I never touched my eyes, and if there was an itch, I blinked it out until my eyes watered, until it seemed like I could have wound my finger behind my eyeball and scratched deep into my skull.

One night, I was plastered on my favorite drink, vodka sodas, leaning on the table, giggling. On the ride home, my eye itched and I reached up drunkenly, not even thinking, to scratch it. I began to rub my eye and it felt borderline orgasmic, like finally peeing after a long wait or releasing a trapped sneeze. I tried to picture the poor little man, bumping around from side to side, clinging desperately to my lumpy eyeball. But I couldn’t feel bad for him because rubbing my eyes just felt so good.

“There’s a zero percent chance keratoconus will make you go blind,” my eye doctor told me, ripping the top sheet of the prescription pad off. It was for eye drops, to help allergies, in case I did feel compelled to rub my eyes. “I treat, like, sixty keratoconus cases a year. They told us at a medical conference that the average eye doctor has like, four patients with keratoconus. I was like, four? It seems like everyone in New Mexico has keratoconus, and then they rub their eyes and it just gets worse and worse.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s all the damn chamisa.”

Chamisa is a flowery yellow plant that grows in ten-foot-high bushes in northern New Mexico, where I was living at that point. It looks like golden lace pouring down the sidewalks, but it stinks like wet dog, and releases some sort of extra-potent pollen that causes a state-wide wave of allergies every season. Combined with the juniper trees crouching everywhere, people who are new to New Mexico basically have the flu for a month or so every spring.

I didn’t tell my new eye doctor about my old eye doctor drawing a little stick figure man onto the print-out of my eye photograph. I didn’t tell him that I still sometimes picture that little man. Lounging beneath the Silly Putty moon that is my eyeball, reading A Clockwork Orange, still in his puffy spacesuit and oversized helmet. When he peers out from under my eyelashes and sees a bartender pouring me a fresh vodka soda, blooms of chamisa waving in the background, my contact lens bobbing like a big satellite dish, he rolls his eyes, knowing he’s in for a rough night.

 

Bri Neumann is a queer writer currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She finds herself drawn to the lyric nature of the everyday, and writes fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid works. Her current work is an attempt to mix her normal life with things that aren’t quite so normal. She has a BA in English from Arizona State University, and will be attending New York University for her MA in the fall of 2020. Currently, she works teaching film and creative writing to teenagers, and is writing a novel about oracles and generational trauma.

 

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