I dropped my glasses into some gravel at an unknown date last spring. They were mildly scratched. I know because two and a half pages in the journal I was using at the time to jot down notes and sketches and whatnot for my game have been repurposed to describe the process in exhausting detail. Minus the date, which is strange. Typically, I am very organized in labelling my note-taking, but it’s possible that being concerned with what day it was felt trivial or even inappropriate given the severity of the issue at hand.
If my account is to be trusted, the glasses flew off my face and into the debris from some shitty condos that were being built near my house while I was taking off my mask. In response, I cursed loudly several times within earshot of a mother with two young children, composed myself, and walked home with the mangled remains of my glasses in my hands where I then inscribed the aforementioned two and a half pages into the Moonrabbit Game journal (from back to front, for a likely very wacky reason) and cried.
Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote:
Holding them up to my face I can see that my glasses are indeed scratched. I’ve only had these since Christmas. They were a replacement for my old pair, which I treated awfully– but I’ve learned since then. I clean these every day. I am SO careful. It’s been made clear to me that replacement glasses are not something that happen often.
These were hundreds of dollars. These glasses probably cost more than a small, maybe nonverbal child from a third world country, and now they’re fucking ruined. All because I put on my mask even though that family was on the other side of the block. Fuck.”
It’s good to see I was at least processing and not punching holes in the wall.
Okay, few things annoy me more than when people say junk like “Man, I was so dumb six months ago” when referring to things they wrote six months ago so I’m gonna avoid doing that here and minimize the laughs at Spring Me’s expense. Most people who were dumb six months ago are still dumb now, they’ve just learned to hide it better.
I clearly felt stupid for getting this upset over a very First World Problem and was already trying to bury my vulnerability under a more comfortable tone, so I’ll cut myself some slack. Like everyone else in the world there was other stuff going on in my life to feel unhappy about (though not the weather, or my luxuriously heated house) that could have contributed to my overall willingness to throw a pity party. Though I would like to think that I’ve grown enough in the past six months to not need spellcheck to get “permanence” or whether or not I cried about my broken glasses right.
Even though I know how cool I was half a year ago, it’s still interesting to see how bad something had to be to completely break me. I ended up getting my lenses fixed and the frames bent back into shape for “free” because apparently the nicer the glasses your parents buy for you are the longer the warranty on them lasts (which still goes against everything I know to be true about how capitalism works), so the only remaining visible damage was a little cut on the left lens from when they put them through the glasses fixing machine, I guess.
After analyzing my reaction to a small cut disfiguring my glasses on a (clearly) beautiful spring day (and also I live in Seward Park, did I mention that?) and realizing my emotional grit score was next to zero, it’s kind of impressive that I didn’t explode into flesh confetti or spontaneously combust or something after experiencing pretty much the emotional equivalent of getting hit by a ten thousand ton bullet train on my way to my first train convention also on my birthday. And then the doctor that was supposed to be fixing me up at the ICU was like, a monkey they trained to use human tools for TikTok or three little kids stacked on top of each other in a doctor’s coat or some bullshit like that.
My glasses and I were actually in a very similar place over the summer– someone had sat on them by accident the day before my ole run-in with the void, so for a few weeks there both of our main functions were just sitting on the ground in a million pieces, trying not to be useless or cut anyone.
Surprisingly, I didn’t output any bleak, harrowingly rendered accounts of my struggle from the trenches after the second glasses-breaking/what more or less felt like the end of everything. I didn’t even bring back ripped jeans or piercings or something cool from the abyss once I’d stayed my welcome. I just kind of went into the woods every day and made an ambient playlist until I felt like the trees were watching me because they knew how terrible I was and it was time to go back to my cave. When I got my fixed glasses back for the second time, I felt a tinge of betrayal. How dare this inanimate object fully recover after only a week away? I could tell that their being on my face and providing me with sight was just a front for further gloating. I went away for a month and still looked like shit! Ridiculous.
The amount of shattered pieces of yourself you track down, glitter-glue back together and get cut on in the process after a Fuck-all, call-it-quits, doomsday-level event completely extinguishes any sparks of hope deep down in your soul is greater than the number of pieces in one of those giant Death Star LEGO sets you saw in the LEGO Christmas catalogue you got until you stopped being twelve and they took you off the mailing list. I still haven’t found a lot of them. Maybe they just got stuck under the oven and melted.
So that’s where I’m at, I guess. I was meaning to get around to saying something about waking up in the morning to a Brand New Day and finding joy in the little things but it’s dark when I wake up now and there’s already greeting cards at CVS that say basically that. I was gonna try to get something out by Halloween about how empty video game maps are scary but writing stuff has been hard and this is what I ended up with.
Hopefully I’m here in another six months writing about how the sink hole that opened up under my house makes losing everyone close to me and hating myself seem super trivial and kind of funny now, looking back on it from the wreckage of my once-Nice House in the Columbia City/Lakewood/Seward Park area. Thoughts and prayers to the families of those consumed by the hole. Maybe my real Spooky Halloween Thesis is that no matter how scary something that happens to you seems, things can always be, (and likely at some point in the near future) will be much more terrifying and much, much, worse. So you haven't seen the worst of it, then! Are you kidding me? You're in your prime! This is it! Great news.
