They were annoying at first, but something I could ignore. I noticed them when I thought I saw a fly darting across the room in my peripheral. It was nothing serious until it was. The little fly-sized dots grew into huge splotches of gray. Like everything in the room was covered in a dark shadow. It got so bad I couldn’t drive or read or enjoy looking at anything anymore. All I could focus on was the slice of gray haze in the leftmost part of my vision.
I stopped going to work. Anxiety and depression chained me to my bed. Whole days were spent staring into the gray. I called around to different eye doctors and they all assured me it was nothing to worry about. That everyone has floaters. They go away. You’ll get used to it. None of them made me feel any better.
After days spent searching online Ifinally read about a surgery that could help. There was a doctor nearby that agreed to do it. He said he’d suck out all the fluid in my eyeball and replace it with a saline solution. He said a vitrectomy was totally safe but warned me the floaters could come back one day. I said I’d try anything to get rid of them and booked the procedure.
The morning before my surgery was the worst it ever was. It covered the whole left side of everything I could see. I was lying in bed on my right side, staring at the wall and the rocking chair in the corner of the room. The gray hung from the ceiling down to the middle of my sight like a half-drawn curtain. I wanted to fall asleep, but the stress of the surgery was crawling across my brain like a million spiders. Just when the urge to close my eyes finally crept over me, I saw something through the floater.
A face hung there in the air, smiling with crooked knives of teeth. It’s skin was like white latex stretched to its limit over a skull. And the features didn’t parse. The eyes too big, and the mouth too wide. There wasn’t a body connected to the face. Just a blurred line severing the head where the gray floater ended and the light started again. A jolt of panic shot upmy spine. I sat straight up in bed, and the face disappeared.
Everything looked fine. Half of the room light and clear, and the other half faded, dim, and gray. I told myself it was the start of a dream. Just the tip of a nightmare poking through into reality.
Except I was wide awake when the bony white hand with too many fingers reached for me from my left side. I turned toward it and saw the face again before falling over the side of the bed and onto the floor.
Crouched there against the wall with my knees to my chest, I scanned the room like an oscillating fan, trying to cover every inch. I started from the left and slowly turned my head. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my head while I waited for the hand or the face to pop into view again. When neither did, I climbed back into bed all sweaty, embarrassed, and shaken up.
My mind grabbed onto a theory. What if I wasn’t seeing anything behind the floater? But I was looking into it? Maybe there was a window through the floater’s gray curtain, and something that could only be seen by looking through it.
It was an insane thought. The surgery was in six hours. It would be over soon and so would the extra stress. That’s all it was: stress. Even if the theory were true, the surgery would close the window soon enough.
I rolled over and stretched my legs into the space next to me, expecting the cool and fresh feeling of undisturbed sheets. But it felt warm like my body heat had been leaking into the fabric the whole morning. I would have sworn I hadn’t been on that side of the bed. Somewhere in that thought, I fell asleep and didn’t wake back up until my alarm went off.
The surgery was a success according to the doctor. The bandage had to stay on for a long time and things would be blurry for a while, but he was confident the floater was gone. In fact he said it went so well, he was almost positive it wouldn’t come back ever again.
After weeks of wearing an eye patch and then seeing only blobs and blurs, my vision cleared. It was better than ever. No dots, splotches, and no gray curtain. I was working. I was driving. Reading. Watching TV. I had my life back. Everything was okay again until the morning it wasn’t.
The face I saw in the floaters had stuck with me. Even when things were good, the image of it was there, branded into my brain. I thought of it every time I was alone and heard a floorboard creak in the middle of the night or felt a tickle on the back of my neck. The worst of it came one morning before work. I’d gotten out of the shower and the room was full of steam. Fog covered the entire bathroom mirror except for jagged streaks forming letters that said
STILL HERE
The face and the thing it belonged to hadn’t gone away. The noises at night, and the tickles on my skin. The strange warmth in my bed. It was still there. Whatever window was opened, the thing crawled through it. And I closed that window and locked it. The thing was stuck.
I just wanted to fix my eye floaters. But now I’m praying they come back. The thing from the window is angry. I wake up with bruises and cuts. Scratches across my stomach say
LET OUT
I need the window open again. I’ve been spending hours searching online and read that staring into the sun can help. Head trauma too. Whatever it takes, I’ll get the floaters back.