Translated…
The table on my right had three men sitting there, and I’d sat alone, eating my food, with their conversation as my side dishes, heard them talked of how their lives had been, since the last time they’d met up, one of them was a doctor, another worked on Wall Street in the financial industries, the other, unknown; I’m guess, that must’ve been a get-together of the former coworkers, in their conversations, I’d heard the experiences they’d shared in the past, and, the atmosphere was amicable. As they got to the halftime, the financial analyst got up to go to the restroom, at which time, I’d also noted, as he’d stood up on the walkways, “slash!”, he’d skillfully shook open a retractable guiding stick,, turns out, he’s blind.
Or maybe, nearly blind. As he’d returned, the blind man started talking of how he’d lost his vision. In one eye, he had serious myopia, in the other, retinal detachment, and so, all he could make out of from his eyes was that dim light, blinking, like that light, at the entryway of a cave. “I’d trained myself as if I’m completely blind right now”, the man said. And that, must’ve not been something recent, I think, because there’s that sense of letting go from the man’s voice, even, with a hint of smiles.
Maybe, he’d once tried convincing himself, that being blind isn’t all that bad, that after he couldn’t see, the most important matters of his life started showing. There are the “double blind” experiments in the medical realm, which utilized this sort of covering up: a group of gets the experimental medication, the other group, a placebo that looked EXACTLY like the real thing, nobody knows if one is getting the treatment; and, neither does the analysts of the data, the analysts don’t know which person belongs to which group. And, by hiding these information, the results are all too clear—take away the preconceived notions, subtracted the effects of the placebo, worked or not, it will all show, in the collected data.
Not being able to see, it’s sometimes, a gift. As I was growing up, I’d rushed to see the movie, “The New Midnight Music”, the male lead, Chang’s face was disfigured because someone splashed acid onto him, the female lead, Wu, had, gone insane, these two problems are so serious, but, at the end of the movie, the love birds who were torn apart are bound to meet back up again, and so, through the whole movie, I kept wondering to myself, what, should they do? Gladly, at the turn of the storyline, the female character’s mental illness was gone, but she’d become blind. And, after she’d gone blind, she can no longer see the face of the one whom she loved, she could only touch; when Wu’s hands touched Chang’s disfigured face, the me at fifteen, cried, on the way home. The first time, I’d learned, that for the damaged prince and princess, this, may have been the best end.
Training himself as a completely blind person. The man who has the damaged eyesight’s word stayed with me since that night. Preparing for the darkness in life, getting familiarized with the environment, his age of darkness is about to hit, but, I believe, maybe, in that darkness that he will come to live in, he might gain a depth of understanding about life; and, for now, I need not worry, I still have some colors, some scenes, lights and shadows. And still, at the same time, there are, a lot of things in this world, that I couldn’t get a closer look at, for understanding’s sake, with my own eyes.
And so, this, is what the narrator came to understand about life, from a conversation she’d overheard in a café, and, she could relate to the blind man’s sentiments, and, she’d made his experiences in life, meaningful to herself.
Life, the Obstacle Course 