writing-prompt-s:

Due to a curse placed upon your bloodline, you’re invisible. You’ve been married to your blind wife for 25 years and she’s just gotten surgery to recover her vision

There are days she considers the surgery a mistake. Probably more common than the days she’s glad for it.

She has only vague memories of the time, decades ago, when she last tested as anything above legally blind. It was perhaps nostalgia for those youthful times (remembered vaguely, fondly, for so many other reasons) that she chose to try the procedure in the first place.

The doctors do mention this to long-blind patients seeking surgery. They do. Sometimes.

But they never stress it enough.

How after so many years of blindness or near-blindness, the brain can, in a sense, forget how to see.

When those old, old cataracts come away, the vision fills with shapes, colors… but the mind has to relearn what they mean. What it signifies when a certain area of light or dark, a certain form in one hue or another, increases in size, or begins to move downward.

Sometimes it means a thing is coming closer. Other times it’s moving or changing in the same lateral fashion it initially seems to. Learning this is a process– a long, slow, torturous one.

The sight of a sunrise, or a loved one’s approaching face, isn’t instant, instinctive joy… as much as those around you might expect or want you to have that response.

Her emotions, she feels, are always disappointing her family these days.

While at the same time, she often fears that these new learned skills… these volumes of data on how to interpret this restored sense of vision… are crowding out the more comfortable, more familiar, more useful things learned over decades upon decades. She worries that she is losing the long-honed skills of understanding her other, loyal senses, the ones that have been there for her all along.

She regrets the surgery, some days.

…She does not regret who she married.

The only person who still seems the same to her, now.