vision and wire circle or: in a strange confessive mood

i am closing my right eye, and staring for many minutes at the tip of my nose, then at my hand, that i keep close to my face, in a vertical position. i am slowly opening my right eye, and closing the left one instead. i am doing this again and again, for hours. i don't know what to make of the wonder i have just discovered, that the image forming in front of me changes if looked at with one eye or another. i am shattered. the world is no longer the world. my hand will never be whole again. doubt has seized my heart. i am closing my right eye, carefully, hoping each time that i am proven wrong, that this was only a momentary delusion. that there is still a way to make the being stable and right.

when i was about 10 years old, i noticed that my eyes got gradually weaker. one day, however, i stumbled upon another groundbreaking discovery: if one uses the fingers to pull at the corner of the eye towards the temples, until the eyes change into an almond shape and then into one thin line narrowing the horizon, the bright clear vision is restored. not for long, eventually tears come and blur the view, but long enough.

by then my conviction that the world is deeply flawed had only become deeper. and I was of the firm belief that nobody would ever like me if i wore glasses. as it happened, i still harboured a somewhat incomprehensible optimism which made me gather all the patient virtues of the little pragmatist who was still alive in me back than (however feebly breathing, i should add). i came up with a brilliant emergency plan: i would employ my new eye-pulling tactics as often as needed to save face in dangerous situations, as implied, for example, by the necessity of jotting down what the teacher was writing on the blackboard. and at the same time i would spend 20 minutes daily (i have no recollection as to why i settled for this precise duration) to exercise wearing my mother's glasses at home and thus correcting my view.

four years afterwards, the result was a complete disaster. i lived surrounded by a perpetual vapour in which all things had lost their natural contours. one day, the flawed world collapsed. my schoolmate betrayed me. intrigued by the sudden and repeated change of the girl he shared the bank with into an implausible chinese doll with misty eyes, he had eventually managed to pull out my secret, which landed in my teacher's ear. and from there in my mother's ear, who, with a puzzled look on her face, took off her glasses and looked at them as if she had seen them for the first time in her life.

i look at the cottage in front of me. then i discover it. i look at the wire circle, wondering about its hidden meaning, and i want to look still closer. step by step, i approach it. i change the place.

suddenly, the time stands still. at the centre of the wire circle the cottage rests in its fullness. shapes have mutated in front of my blinded eyes, and a mandala has emerged. right through the heart of the cottage, there flows another time, unknown to the world. i am roundness myself, sacred in a new body.

and then it happens. slowly, against my desperate wish to resist, my left eye closes. i want to hang onto the cottage walls, to fasten myself to its bricks, the quiet roof. to stop it from gently sliding to the right, breaking through the circle of perfection.

i fail. a bird shrieks in the bush. i turn around.
there is a flutter of wings somewhere, and I am still.