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.
awww THANK YOUuu
…just got a tiny bit more inspiration too….
Your wife knows about the curse, obviously; knew it since before your marriage, though you both married young. She was in her twenties, already functionally blind, very much in love.
Invisibility seemed a non-issue to her and you both. But you still told her. Life partners share these burdens, and of course she would have to face the ways your condition affected that shared life.
“Bloodline curse” meant not only some invisible in-laws, but the risk of invisible offspring, as well. And to combine that with her own, clearly genetic, early-onset blindness?
Of course she had to go into the marriage knowing all the choices she would need to make.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want children. She did, at least a part of her, deep down.
But she had resigned herself to letting go of that, long before she encountered you and your bloodline curse. Her own, back then, seemed bad enough.
Now, though…
Her thoughts are shifting to strange new places.
It’s not so much that the surgery she underwent is now available, so effective and safe these days. It’s not just that her children could have this option, should they want it.
It’s that now… in the wake of her complex feelings on that surgery and the status quo it took from her… now, she’s beginning to feel that neither of these things were curses, exactly.
And that perhaps, just maybe, there is no family in the world who could be better equipped to give blind invisible children the life they deserve.
She is in her forties, now. Not without other risks, certainly.
But… it isn’t too late.