I woke up one morning last week, and my perspective was crooked.
It's been askew ever since.
Two paths lie before me, two paths through the world, and I can see each of them, simultaneously, with crystalline precision. The colors and textures of each road lay before me, tantalizingly full and rich. I can smell and taste and feel each way ahead with perfect clarity.
One eye is trained on each option, assessing, seeking. And each of my eyes have learned to operate independent of the other. They do not see in tandem, anymore; rather, each one is complete unto itself. Like the tracks that stretch before me, each of my eyes is wholly cut off from the other. There is no place where the paths meet, or cross, or where one could move from one to another.
No, once I set foot on either of these paths, the other will be lost.
Neither path is without darknesses, without those places where the trees grow tall and thick and gnarled, where branches overhang and scrape the ground and whether or not you make it past them will depend on your flexibility. I can see the difficulties.
But I can't tell how long the dark places stretch, or how quickly the difficulties arise. I can't tell how long those bucolic sunlit scenes that beckon to me last. I can see happiness and I can see sadness, but I don't know when or how much.
It's the combination of your two eyes, you see, that allow you to percieve such things, and I no longer have one pair of eyes, I have two eyes. I have two eyes.
This is why my perspective is skewed. This is why I cannot move forward, this is the source of my paralysis.
I can see two different versions of my best self.
How can I possibly choose between them?
I keep bumping into things in the here and now, because my eyes are divorced from each other. I keep banging the tender parts of myself into harsh corners and sharp edges because I can't tell where I end and where the world begins.
