The fiber optic lights on my small Christmas tree pulsate at a rate that could cause seizures, but my contacts have been carefully placed in their proper containers. I am blind, so the lights are soft round balls of color to my eyes. They look almost fluffy.

Being blind always seemed like a detriment to me, but now, I pity the perfectly sighted. My cheap little tree looks like a wondrous joy of light and flickering. I want to reach out and touch the fluffy lights, but they don’t exist. They are merely tiny specks in the real world. In blind world they are large, round and almost feathery.

Only the blind can experience this. I am amazed at the beauty and call Mike to see, but he can see too well. He takes off his glasses and squints his eyes, but they are just lights to him because he is not blind.

I forget how blind I am sometimes. The gas-permeable contacts go into my eyes within minutes of my waking and stay there until right before I sleep. My eyesight has been aided since the age of ten on that beautiful day when I got my first pair of glasses. The world was suddenly sharper. I could see things that I never knew other people could see. Each leaf on the tree was visible and flapping with the breeze.

The MOUNTAINS! Oh dear Jehovah, the mountains! I could see every crevice, crag and gulley. My lovely mountains of soft billowy snow were transformed into a crisp backdrop worthy of any episode of the Brady Bunch. The white blobby clouds looked like cotton fluff and angel hair.

In that instant so many years ago, I realized all the best in the world that I had been missing. I remember taking my glasses off and comparing the two images, filling in the details. After years with corrected vision, however, I had forgotten. The beauty and softness of the world when I was blind was lost to me that day and replaced with the crisp details and never ending minutia.

When I am blind, the world suddenly becomes smaller and softer. The lights loom largely over me with hazy halos. My reaction time is slowed, so my walking is slower. The world closes in on me when I am blind. I had forgotten how cozy it could be.