I sleep with one eye open. I wake with one eye open. I read with one eye open. I think with one eye open. I fuck with one eye open. I shit with one eye open. I have no choice. That’s all I can do. I am permanently blind in my right eye. The doctors said it was Central Retinal Artery Occlusion (in precisely those words) and that I was a damn idiot for waiting so fucking long to come in (in essentially those words). So the damage was done. My retina was dead and shriveled up for all intents and purposes. C’est la vie.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Cousteau said that to me the first time he visited after I lost my eye. “Fuck you,” I said. Cousteau had a way of knowing exactly the right thing to say to make a shitty mood even shittier. You couldn’t help but love the guy though. The bastard brought me a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel in the event that he found me all At Eternity’s Gate in the living room. “Fuck you,” I said. “You know me better than that. I could wake up completely blind and still have it in me to find you and kick your ass before I take myself to the hospital.”  The Jameson really did help regardless.

Most people don’t know what Costeau and Lola know. Everyone feels bad for me and or at least like to pretend they feel bad for me, but the fact of the matter is that losing my right eye to CRAO really only puts me slightly above a level playing field with everyone else because I’ve got a Third Eye right in the center of my forehead slightly above my eyebrows. I don’t know how long I’ve had it and normally I’d say stuff like this is all bullshit, but I discovered it after my dad died when I was 13 and I woke up early one morning to the fucker sitting on the floor in the middle of my bedroom smiling up at me like a drunk Buddha and pointing upwards with one finger. (Still haven’t figured out what that meant and he hasn’t appeared to me since.) The first person I told about my Third Eye was Costeau after about a year of knowing him and really only because he confessed to me that he’d killed someone in a bar fight when he was 19 (having snuck into the bar tagging along with his older sister and a group of friends) after he confronted a guy that kept harassing his sister (who turned out to be her boyfriend (she hadn’t told anyone in the family) and that really became a whole other thing since he mentioned offhand once on a rare night when we’d gone out to the east side to try out some new bar that named all its drinks after classical compositions that he hadn’t spoken to her since (he’s 35 just like me). “It really was worth it though” he had said. “That guy was a vile asshole.” If there is one thing you can safely say about Costeau is that he punches above his weight class (although you might not be able to tell just by looking at him and I’ll admit that I was impressed by his violence because I cringe from just killing bugs). So in a reciprocal display of confidence and intimacy and perhaps fear, I told Costeau of all the things I can see and hear with my Third Eye. Things like the colors of emotions, the various shapes of words, the weight of other people’s thoughts, the sound of the sun and moon, etc. 

“I already know,” he had said then. “I dreamed about this last night. A very convincing dream.” He said normally he’d just distance himself from me at this point and eventually just stop talking to me because everything I was saying was completely batshit, but he knew the dream was talking to him in a very real way. And it was. I know because it was me. The night before I had fallen asleep thinking about the conversation we were going to have and I must have projected myself into his dreams with my Third Eye. 

And so it was with my Third Eye that I immediately understood Lola was the love of my life the first time I saw her. Ah, Lola. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. My brain scrambled entirely, my neurons misfiring and colliding as she walked past me on Tilikum Crossing that fateful day in July. Nothing made sense. Her hair was a sound. Her skin was a scent. She was all colors and louder than the sun. Her thoughts were a kiss on the hippocampus…