xxxiv

When you look at Clark Kent when he's working at the Daily Planet, he's a reporter. He doesn't fly through the air in his glasses and his suit.

-Gene Simmons

In the early weeks of May, one of the tiny metal screws which latch together the two thin tin pieces of glasses frame rebelliously fell out of its careful groove and onto the unvacuumed carpet of my room. And for the past three months, I have neglected to get it fixed, quietly allowing the pair of previously trustworthy glasses to wallow in the misery of common injury. They are resting in the soft velvet of a five-year-old black case, serving out their prison sentence with chalk scrapes on the upper lid.

But today, finally, after weeks and weeks of personally succumbing to the blindness of eleven-o'clock, after weeks and weeks of quietly ambling through blurry nighttime halogen lamplight sessions, my brown, spec-mottled glasses are back in commission, proudly being paraded on my face as a triumphant Purple Heart soldier.

It's as if they never had left the crooked, bruised bridge of my nose, snugly and familiarly still snug to slow-wrinkling eye dimples. 

Whispering, the recomissioned, polished lenses take notice of the new smarting blood scratch on the upper left side of my cheek, resting and smirking, itself ambivalent to the scratch vanishing cream and Neosporin. But they don't say anything.

I think they're just happy to be back.