In My Mind’s Eye, #SoCS

Sometimes, when I get to the end of the week, I am so excited for Friday. I can’t wait to log onto Linda’s website, to find out what the prompt is for the week.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SATURDAY

Then, as Friday makes way for Saturday, well I become hesitant. I start wondering what I should write and if I could possibly have anything to say, using the letters or word she has chosen.

That’s not the point though. If I wait and then, Saturday comes, I get writing and the words begin to flow.

***

You know that well-known belief that people who are blind can hear better than everyone else?

Well, I listen hard and voices and music are some of my favourite things, so I hope I always hear them both.

I have a keen sense of smell. Just ask my family.

I have an excellent set of taste buds, if I do say so myself. Again, ask those closest to me and they will tell you I can drive them crazy with these talents.

🙂

I use all this and touch to navigate my world, all because I can hardly see.

But yet…I believe I am a sighted person, even still.

This may sound strange. Please, allow me to elaborate.

I used to see so much more and I miss it, along with forgetting just what it was like, as the years pass me by.

In my mind I can see.

My mind threatens to burst, sometimes, from the strain of all that I see with my mind’s eye. As the memories fade, I cling to them all the more tightly, as my mind’s eye begins its work.

The seeing eye is alive and well in there.

There’s fire and a roving eye up there, but I’m not evil like that guy.

Yeah, I’m trying really hard not to imagine The Great Eye.

🙂

Not exactly appropriate for what I’m getting at here, if you are following me anyway.

It’s just that the phrase “in my mind’s eye” says just one eye and then I naturally go to Lord of the Rings because, well, I just do. Can’t help myself really.

Anyway, back to what I was saying…this is stream of consciousness writing, after all.

I get headaches and I sometimes like to tell myself the story, to at least frame that in a somewhat positive light, if headaches can be light at all, by saying I started getting them in the immediate years that followed my original vision loss.

This is true.

This goes for so many things: letters and cursive writing, colours, the faces of my family, the ever-disappearing television screen, even the numbers on an alarm clock or my old dialysis machine. I used to see those in the dark, but now I picture them in the darkness of my mind.

Those things are aided by my memory and so I have an easier time re-picturing them in my mind.

It’s the things I have not seen and will never really see that cause the pain in my head, my mind clattering and thudding up against my skull in desperation.

In my mind, I’m staring at a computer screen, like I did those first times, when the Internet was new.

I am seeing, in my mind’s eye, the faces of my sweet niece and nephews, of which I will never get a fully defined idea of that sweetness in their little faces.

In my mind, I am picturing every beautiful thing in nature and on the travels I have gone on and hope to go on. I can’t complain. Since having all the vision I did have, at one time, this allows me to have a little help in guessing what things might look like, giving my mind less of a workout, but it’s still a challenge.

I see the long lost words on the page.

But back to reality, and the voices on my phone and laptop keep speaking to me, as my mind runs on and on and on. My mind’s eye is where I really want to be.

I now must see more and more of the things I used to see with my eyes, with my mind’s eye. I try and my head aches, because I just can’t stop seeing all the loveliness of the world in that space between my ears.

I wish I could stop, not care, not bother to even try. I wish I could sleep at night, without hundreds of images flashing through in there, like one of those programs that provides a slideshow of photographs, like the one on my mom’s computer.

I can’t stop. I can’t rest. This slideshow runs through, again and again, ceaselessly, but in some strange and painful way, I don’t want it any other way. I can’t make it stop, but deep down, I guess I never want it to.

Thanks, Linda, for this weekly writing prompt:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/08/21/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2215/

I am thankful for the opportunity to have an open-ended window of pure creative writing time, which is different and separate from everything else I do with my blog.