I’ve just yesterday acquired the first pair of glasses I’ve ever really needed.

(Once, when I was in middle school, I ended up with a glasses that I believe, in retrospect, I did not need. I was interested in the idea of glasses, and, though my memory of the situation is too foggy now to allow any confirmation, I suspect that I may have bluffed a shred of difficulty in reading the chart in order to justify a weak prescription. All part of the strange and difficult process of self-discovery that defined the period from 11-17. (Not to say that, at 18, that process ended; it just became somewhat less awkward and difficult and generally a bit more fun.))

And so, for the first time in some years of mellow decline, my vision at a distance has snapped back into sharp focus: buildings that have been hazy are now again built from firm, straight materials; strangers half a block down have once again resolved the blurry pools of their faces into sharp lines and compellingly differentiated features; signs have become again things from which to read rather than things at which to squint helplessly.

In the right eye, anyhow. The left eye is marginally improved but still at least half as blurry as without the lens. The receptionist I talke with at the office of the eye doctor assured me that some adjustment is common, and asked me to wear them for a week to see if that improves. I’m skeptical, but I’ll play ball — I’ve never done this sort of thing before.

Aside from that fundamental left-eye question, though, I’m feeling generally disoriented by the glasses vs. no-glasses experience. Everything within six feet is plenty sharp, and the things I look at during my day (my computer monitor, stacks of paper) are all within two feet or so where everything is utterly crisp. So I don’t so much need them. So leave them off? And don them only when venturing out into the world? That’s the best plan I can reason at the moment.

But every time I toggle between glasses and no-glasses, I am taken aback by the adjustment my eyes go through. And so the question: should I in fact wear them throughout the day anyhow? Or what?

One other thing: having had my vision snap back into full focus (at least on the right, goddammit), I’m suddenly very viscerally aware of how blurry distant things are whereas before yesterday afternoon I was only aware in theory, wondering if, while my vision has certainly degraded, I was only imagining the full perfect crispness I once laid upon those objects which fell within my youthful purview. But now there’s no question: my eyes are fuckin’ failing.