Blindness Is a Strange Country

I’m going blind as I write this. It feels less dramatic than it sounds. The words aren’t disappearing as I type. I’m sitting comfortably in the sunroom. The sun is rising like it’s supposed to. I can plainly see Lily sitting next to me, reading in her striped pajamas. The visible world is disappearing, but it’s not in a hurry. It feels at once catastrophic and commonplace—like reading an article about civilization’s imminent collapse from the climate crisis, then setting the article down and going for a pleasant bike ride through a mild spring morning.

There’s no cure for retinitis pigmentosa (RP), the condition I was diagnosed with more than 20 years ago, so I usually see my eye specialist every other year. During my last visit, she showed me an illustration of how much vision I had left.

There are as many ways of being blind as there are of being tall, or sick, or hot.

It reminded me of ice cubes melting in hot water: two small, wobbly ovals in the center, and two skinny shapes floating along