The bottles along my bathroom mirror are a row of blurred colors that I can barely make out – greens, blues, and that white one over there – and I grab the right one out of habit, opening my eyes with two drops which clear away the sleep. How sad is it that I can’t even make out my own reflection until my nose is inches away from the water-stained glass of the mirror. My breath fogs the glass. I study the brown pupils which are suddenly so close and sharp and ruined.

I cracked the window open last night but the smell of varnish hangs in the air like an unpleasant dream and I’m eager to escape this place. The bright blue numbers of my clock, which I can now see clearly thanks to two little circles of soft, wet plastic, read 6:47. I picture my contacts, the thin slivers of translucent blue smoothing out ugly, irregular curves of my pupils until I can see. Before I leave, I drag a finger across the thick smears of oil paint, white light shimmering across luminous multi-colored irises that stare unblinkingly into the distance.

---

Green leaves and red brick line the West Village streets, which I count as I walk – 9, 10, 11. After four years in upstate New York, my cousin moved into the city and opened a photography studio. A nail salon sits to one side and on the other, a bakery breathes out puffs of sugar and dough, bringing a stream of customers to the street. We pay extra for this large windowed space on the corner.

As I walk through the door, Jeremy pushes his glasses up, the black frames thick and constant. He turns back to the lighted stand in front of him and brings the camera to his eyes. Photography runs in my family. We view the world through camera lenses – a technical, mechanical sort of art. I remember when I first picked up my dad’s camera, its weight tugging at my wrists, caught in the heavy, inexorable pull of gravity. I loved the smooth click of its shutter, felt the power and permanence in the act of capturing a photograph. As the years passed, I learned that I’d much rather feel the tip of a paintbrush against a pebbly white plain, dragging swirls of paint through the emptiness until it forms something beautiful.
I turn from Jeremy’s shoot and walk through the studio. Interspersed with the studio’s photographs which cover the walls are pieces of my own work – a departure from the reality of photography. There is contrast between a series of black and white photographs of the city and a yellow painting, filled with delicate triangles which rise like modern pyramids from the wall, and it is beautiful.

---

Canvases – some half-finished and some entirely untouched in their plastic sheaths – sit on the floor at the back of the studio. This is my own space, away from the brilliant fluorescent lighting of the main studio space which we pay so much for. I treasure the expanse of window which brings freckled sunlight, dancing with the shadows of leaves, flooding onto my canvases. A recording of Gould’s Goldberg Variations trickles endlessly from the studio’s speakers. Jeremy says that the music helps him keep a steady hand, preventing the surreal blur of motion so undesirable in photography. The creation of art is worlds away from photography; music frees my hand, and I uncap a small jar of oil from amidst piles of worn paint tubes. Knowing that I will want to be here a while, I pull out a familiar green bottle, a twin to the one living on my bathroom counter, from the recesses of my desk. Four drops keep my eyes unclouded.

Today I’m painting the sea, greener than blue and frothing with white. Its waves soar upwards in minuscule arches, dropping back down as they curl, thin, and finally disappear into the wind-blown surface of the water. This is the ocean I can only watch from a distance. I’ve never been able to see the color of its salt-filled depths.

I want to paint until my world is filled with the same dabs of pigment as the canvas before me, thick and so incredibly vivid, chasing away the ironic forces which ruin my vision until I’m pushing -8.00 and almost blind. There isn’t anything more unfair. The linseed fumes sting my nose and I feel my eyes drying. Each blink is a feeble attempt to stop two circles of plastic from constricting the pale, bleary surface of my ruined eyes. Out comes the green bottle. Six drops fall into two brown pupils, nearly sightless on their own.

---

Jeremy pushes me out the door at 3:30. The studio has been quiet all day and he’s finishing commissions for the rest of the afternoon. He tells me I’ll forget how to take a decent photograph if I leave the camera for too long. I’d never forget how to use a paintbrush, each movement like an extension of my own hand. The ocean-filled canvas is still on my desk, sunlight playing along its waves, gold and green intertwining. My camera is a hulking monstrosity that hangs from my neck like a weight. I bring it to my eyes and snap the shutter. Through the lens, the sidewalk is too bright. The tree’s shadows are too dark. The bricks become an indistinguishable mass of reds. The world is flat and lifeless. I want to toss away this clumsy beast of metal and glass, this machine which fails to reflect the beauty in this world. Frustration is too familiar – there were the years of photography with my dad and the piles of photography books lining our shelves until ISO settings ran through my head and my computer overflowed with photographs. I loved photography until I found something different in the silky hairs of a paintbrush.

I walk through the city until shadows grow onto the concrete beneath my feet. Sometimes I love the darkness. Sometimes I run from it. When it wraps around me like a velvet blanket, the city lights glitter like a million stars and I know what I will wish for, for my eyes to be perfect again because I’ve never known perfection in this broken life. But now the darkness closes heavily around me, and I run because this perpetual sea of blackness might someday become my entire world.

---

My apartment still smells like varnish. The eyes are as bright as ever. I’m blinking more now, my contacts sticking and sticking again, and the world is blurring. I fumble for a paintbrush. A tube of black paint, almost empty, is uncapped. The cap is rolling away. There’s no palette here. I squeeze the paint, black as the world outside my window, onto the back of my hand. I drag broken lines, thick and dark as tar, onto the unblemished skin which folds gently into perfect eyes, beautiful eyes. They form letters and suddenly I’m standing up, pulling the slivers of blue from my eyes until the world is a cascade of color but there’s no beauty in it and I’m hopeless, so hopeless because I’m spiraling towards the darkness and there’s nothing I can do.

You have eyes my dear but you cannot see.