The Blind Man

There is a man who lives blindfolded. He chose, long ago, to close his eyes to all around him, to give up sight so he could learn what it was like to feel life. He had woken one morning to find a dissatisfaction weighing on his shoulders, a feeling that life just wasn’t enough anymore.

That morning, as he ignored the oily universe that found its way into his morning coffee, he tried to pinpoint what the issue was.

Had he forgotten to pay a bill?

No, that wasn’t it.

Was he going to die today?

Ah, he had felt that feeling before, and yet he was feeling it again, so it mustn’t be very accurate.

A song started playing on the radio, but he had stopped paying attention to such background noise long ago.

At the cafe where he sat for his habitual early luncheon, he didn’t notice the brilliant colours of the sun, forgot to smelt the fragrance of the early spring jasmine on the vines against the wall. As he sat, consumed with contemplation, a woman walked out onto the road in front of him, oblivious to the oncoming traffic.

‘Look out!’ he cried, as a car horn sounded and she jumped back to the curb, only narrowly missing a collision. She waved a thank-you and moved onwards.

He began to think, how much of one’s life goes past without us noticing it?

What moments to we live though, only to forget seconds later?

And as he sat, he began to try and see things. He tried to have the smell of the flowers overwhelm him, tried to see colours that others miss, tried to taste food and have it fill up his senses, tried to know what it would be like to have to turn the music down, to sit in silence and hear the melody from the piano playing in the next street.

Instead of seeing everything, however, he found himself lost in the detail, becoming blinded to all else, and as he walked home, he felt that same sinking feeling of seeing nothing much at all.

There are some people in this world who know what it’s like to really be alive. They carry with them an innate knowledge in their scarred hands of what it’s like to feel things, to have something cut so deep that out whole solar system could fit inside with room to move. In some way they seem to be intimate with the tiny nuances of living, almost as if they see the detail yet are able to stay afloat, resisting the pull to drown in the smells, the tastes, the feel of things.

He decided that he would do whatever he could to feel life once more.

To open his eyes and see the colours of light, feel the whispers of the wind seeping through the crack in the window against their skin.

To know what colours lie in the darkness, the feel of electricity in others fingertips, the resounding thunder of another’s absence.

Know the taste of light just before dawn, the dry, salty cheek of one who hides their tears.

And he felt the absence of these things and he wept.

Wept tears that filled the room, that bought him afloat, drifting him closer to distant lands, and although he was blinded by his tears, he began to feel things that he had long missed, that had finally found their way home.

He awoke the next morning with a resolution to become voluntarily blind, to close his eyes in order to know what life felt like,

Smelt like,

Sounded like.

At first he was shaky, jumping at the unfamiliar birdcalls, stumbling over the familiar irregularities of his floor, burning his fingers on the stove. Soon, though, he became more confident. He started to learn the differing sounds of others footsteps, the smell of the morning and how it felt compared to the afternoon and evening. He began to recognise the different tones of silence, began to hear everything that was never said.

He found there were more words in people’s silences than in the things that they said. In the folds of his bed sheets he found the memories of a girl he had once loved so much he thought his heart would explode. He tried to let his heart feel that way once more, tried to pull down the walls he had built up around it, but he found it harder than he expected.

Slowly, though, amidst the noises he had never fully heard before, he began to chip away at the walls, a conglomerations of every stone anyone had ever thrown at him, bound together with all the resolutions never to be hurt that way again. As he broke down these walls around his chest, he began once more to feel.