When The Eye Thing Happened

 Four months ago, I woke up blind in my right eye. Not total darkness, mind you—just a smeared mess of blurry nothingness, like someone had smeared Vaseline on my reality. At first, I thought it was a hangover gone rogue or maybe some twisted prank from my own body. But no, it was worse. A blood clot in a vein, they told me. A central retinal vein occlusion, they called it, like that made it any less horrifying.

The why of it all? No one seems to know. Sure, I’ve got high blood pressure, but who doesn’t? I’m not some wreck of a man. I’m relatively fit, healthy even. A few beers here, a couple of glasses of wine there—perfectly civilized behavior. What’s the crime in that? But my theory—take it or leave it—is that this whole mess was courtesy of Covid, the invisible bastard that’s been haunting us all for years now.

To fix it? Three injections. Directly. Into. My. Eyeball. Once a month, like some twisted ritual. I can’t even explain the sensation without wanting to crawl out of my own skin, but I’ll say this: it seems to have worked. The vision’s back, more or less. Not perfect, but better than being half-blind and stumbling through life like a doomed character in a Kafka novel.

At the eye hospital, I was poked, prodded, and shuffled around like dazed cattle, then herded down sterile hallways under flickering fluorescent lights. They moved with the cold efficiency of people who’ve seen it all a thousand times before—just another body to process, another eye to fix. Finally, they led me into a room, white walls, white ceiling, no windows, with one chair sitting dead center.
Two nurses hovered like silent executioners. They guided me into the chair, and though they didn’t strap me down, they might as well have. The room felt like it was closing in, a perfect box designed for discomfort. My eye was numbed with anesthetic—a strange, detached sensation, like the socket had been removed from the rest of me.
Then came the needle. It hovered there for what felt like an eternity as I braced myself, every nerve firing in anticipation of the inevitable. And then it was in, sliding deep into the soft, vulnerable tissue. I could feel it—not pain exactly, just pressure, wrong and invasive—as a gel-like substance oozed into my eyeball, blurring the line between my body and the alien.
It was over quickly enough, but the aftermath lingered. I stumbled out of the room, disoriented, clutching my face like it might fall apart at any moment. The nurses said something, but I wasn’t listening. All I could hear was the faint buzzing in my skull, the ghost of the needle, and the thought that this was only temporary relief. I’d be back.

Is my body failing me now? Edging slowly toward 50—half a goddamned century on this spinning rock, and suddenly the cracks are starting to show. The machine isn’t running like it used to. A few skipped beats here, a strange ache there. Little things, but they pile up, whispering the same grim question: is this the start of the long, slow decline?
I try not to dwell on it, but it’s hard not to see the signs. The blood clot, the high blood pressure, the eyeball injections—what’s next? Every creak and groan feels like a warning, a nudge toward the inevitable spiral. Is this the beginning of the end, the body starting to rebel after decades of mild abuse and good intentions? Or is it just paranoia, that cruel little bastard that comes with age, always whispering in your ear?
They say it’s all downhill after 40, but maybe they were being generous. Maybe the spiral starts earlier, slow at first, so you don’t even notice you’re slipping until you’re too far gone to claw your way back. Or maybe—just maybe—it’s not a spiral at all, but a battle. And if it’s a battle, then hell, I’m not done fighting yet.

And now the question lingers like a bad smell from a men’s changing room locker: will I ever paint again? A one-eyed artist—it’s almost a joke, isn’t it? Like some cruel myth about hubris and punishment, except I didn’t ask for this. I need two eyes. Depth, perspective, the whole damn picture—how can I capture it with half my vision smeared in static? The blank canvas still waits, mocking me, daring me to try, and I can’t shake the feeling that my right eye held some essential piece of the process, some secret key to everything I’ve ever created. Without it, am I just fumbling in the dark? Or worse, am I already finished, the best work behind me? 
These thoughts churn like a storm, but I can’t let them win. Not yet. Not while there’s still a brush in my hand. Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s really over—or if this is just the beginning of the next strange chapter in a book I never agreed to write.