POLLUTING

He kept a pair of subscription eyeglasses tucked in the inner pocket of his backpack, but they were not for seeing. It was a pair of dark rimmed lenses, folded cross-armed and glossy as a moon-lit lake wrapped up in the dainty tan cloth that the optometrist had gifted him when he made the purchase. He wore it often at school, at home, or even when he was grocery shopping. Everyone thought he was near-sighted. 

The first time he had tried on his friend's glasses was in second grade. A girl named Jill was the earliest of her peers to own a pair, and everyone got a kick out of trying them on. When he had put them on and opened his eyes, he felt a sudden faze as the world twisted and turned like jelly; the change was disorienting and uncomfortable. 

When his girlfriend had broken up with him in ninth grade, he was a heart-broken teenager with steaming frustration unable to evaporate outside his head. He had punched lockers and walls, bit his blue and yellow striped pillows, and sobbed uncontrollably in front of his desk for hours. Within the stampede of fallen tears his head began to throb and spin, then he remembered the nauseating sensation he had felt in his youth.

The optometrist had welcomed a boy customer with squinting eyes and brown wind-blown hair. The boy said he had problems seeing the board in school, and so the optometrist gave him an eye-exam. The boy was practically blind; he could barely read the largest letters on the projector. After several trials, the optometrist gave him a pair of eye glasses mysteriously dense, and he said this should help you in school. 

An uncomfortable clarity. Faces were given an extra layer of artificial depth, seeming more profound and about to blur away in some cloud-like form. He enjoyed the type of distortion when everything fell to the unknown, when the sky was disturbingly vivid and  grass peaked in rigid waves, sawtoothed and biting at his eyes tenderly. Then the haziness would gradually cut and rub into the back of his eyeballs and sink into his brain in tumultuous ripples, where something would click in the back of his mind and supply a heap of white, silvery and blinding to his sight.