Missing

I lost my left eye at the Griffin last February, four months before I was supposed to graduate high school. It was a Bare Arms show and I was there with Mallory except we hadn’t spoken since Johnny Chang offered her a hit of acid and she took it. By then she was probably out in the parking lot, lying in the gravel and thinking she could see the whole universe in one of Johnny’s silver teeth. Inside, I watched Daphne volley herself across the stage like sparks off a welding gun, screaming, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” over and over into the microphone when this one ska kid got into it with another ska kid and then Adam pulled a knife out and in the middle of all their skinny-limbed scuffling I was the one who ended up getting sucker-punched by a four-inch blade.

I don’t remember anything. The band was playing and then it was quieter than anything except for the “beep, beep, beep” just like you hear on TV, but softer, and I couldn’t open my eyes. Someone was holding my hand, and I took it away and brought it to my face, reading the weave of the bandages like it was Braille. “Who’s there?” I said. The words stuck together but she understood. “It’s Mallory.” I wanted to ask her other things, like “What happened?” “Where’s my mom?” “Are you still tripping?” “Is she mad?” “Where are we?” “What day is it?” “How did they find you?” but when I opened my mouth all that came out was “Luh.”

On the third day I had surgery. They told me they were going to take my eye out and I said “No.” They said I didn’t have a choice and I said “No.” They said it didn’t work anymore and if they left it in it would just rot and collapse on itself like a moldy tomato. They brought in the glass eyes to show me, only I couldn’t see them because they wouldn’t take the bandages off, even on my good eye. I hadn’t seen anything for three days. “They’re beautiful, Z,” Mallory told me. “They come in all different colors. You could have two different eyes, just like David Bowie.” It isn’t true, I told her, about his eyes being different colors. Once, his friend punched him about a girl and now his pupil won’t close. That’s all. They let me hold the eyes. They were bigger than I thought, as big as those metal balls that come in silk boxes, yin and yang. “I don’t want it,” I said.

When I was little my cousins had a dog with a missing eye. Instead of an eye there was a curve, like a cupped palm, the right size for a marble. My uncle said her favorite thing was when you scratched her missing eye. I could never do it. I was afraid my finger would press right through that no-bone spot and pop up into her brain like a popsicle stick.

I know what they say behind my back, when I’m not listening. They say, “It was only one eye.” They say, “It’s not as though it were both eyes. It’s not as though it was her hands, or her legs, or her stomach. Really,” they say, “she was lucky. Nothing will need to change.”

Sometimes it’s at the front of my mind and sometimes it’s not there at all. Some mornings I wake up and it’s the first thing I think, my body is already thinking it, like I went to sleep last night thinking I’ve lost my eye, I’ve lost my eye, and all through the night I didn’t dream, I just kept thinking and then when I woke up it was already there: “-st my eye, I’ve lost my eye, I’ve lo-.” Other days it might take hours. Really. I will do all the things I do, I will even see my reflection, look past the hookworm scar marking my loss like raised letters on a wall, and then at lunchtime, I will take a sip of water and the taste will remind me, “Oh, yes. I have lost my eye.”

I understand, now, about the dog. I don’t scratch it, but I touch it all the time, sometimes absentmindedly, but usually with great determination, sometimes before a mirror, sometimes not. I touch it like we are falling in love, my missing eye and me. Like we are sitting across from each other in a fancy restaurant, and it says something kind, or the light catches its face just so, and I reach out with one finger and stroke it, shyly.