That Tiny Click You Never Want To Hear

There’s a sound that anyone who wears glasses or hard contact lenses dreads.

A click. Small. Barely there.

Someone else might not have heard it,

But I did.

And I knew exactly what it meant.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was two, and rigid contact lenses since I was seventeen.

My prescription? Not the worst you’ve heard, but definitely not simple, with a generous cylinder, just to keep things interesting.

What does that mean practically?

It means that without my glasses or lenses, I’m basically non-functional.

Over the years I’ve broken two pairs of glasses, torn a soft lens, shattered a hard one, and even dropped one down the sink.

Yes, I got it back, with a heroic operation involving a trap, a strainer, and lots of disinfectant.

But last week, I heard it again.

The click.

I tried to deny it.

Placed it carefully in its case and told myself, if I haven’t seen it broken, maybe it’s not.

Maybe when we get to Miami, it’ll be fine.

It wasn’t.

And with a prescription like mine this isn’t something you just pick up off a shelf.

This is a custom-made lens, with fittings, adjustments, a process that takes three to five weeks on a good day.

And here we are, just landing in the US, about to spend the next month, maybe more, moving our boat from Florida to Annapolis.

No permanent address.

No optometrist.

There's no imidiate solution.

No tricks.

No shortcuts.

No magic fixes.

It’s not a “no”, it’s a “not now”

And now I have to face the one thing I hate most - waiting.

So for now, I’m wearing glasses. I don’t hate them.

Let me be clear, I don’t hate my glasses.

I’m pretty much in peace with them.

Usually.

Except when I step out of the A/C into Florida’s humidity,

or bend down to fix something, and they slide off my nose,

or do any kind of movement that makes them, and my focus, shift.

And to be honest, I do have confidence issues with it regarding the looks, but hey, we all need to have something. right?

But this is where I am. and as soon as I have a ticket back to the holy land, I'll schedule a hot date with my optometrist.

Together, we’ll try to fast-track the process and bring the lenses home where they belong.