She was jarred awake.  She opened her eyes and her vision was clouded. Foggy.  Dim. It was the same, day after day.  Sometimes she noticed that what she saw was darker than normal and sometimes she thought that this was just what her life looked like.  Maybe you should get checked out, she said to herself.  She was a little worried about her view. Maybe a little more than a little worried.  But, to the rest of the world, she pretended she could see just fine.

With her warped perspective, she looked at the screaming, lumpy, thing.  It wiggled and it grunted and it cried and it screwed up her routine.  Her eyes pounded, her head pounded, her heart pounded.  It seemed to be causing her physical distress.  Was she sure that this thing was even hers?   Or was the problem just with her eyes?  She knew it was easy for eyes to become fatigued, causing distortion.  She squinched her eyes, rubbed them, and then pried them wide, trying to get a better look.  It was hard to tell.  Everything was fuzzy.  It didn’t look like hers. She wasn’t sure if it was hers.  She kneaded her eyes and peered again. What if it wasn’t hers?  She kept trying to look harder, to see what she was supposed to see, but no matter how hard she tried to see in the dark, her pupils wouldn’t cooperate, the dilation mechanism was on the fritz, so she blindly groped, hoping she didn’t cause too much damage when she inevitably ran into something.  She knew she needed to keep looking, for something, so she did.

In the meantime, she patted, and she rocked, and she nuzzled, and she cooed, all the while secretly scouring the lumpy flesh, searching around with her eyes. She was determined not to miss whatever it was she knew she should be seeing.  It was like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, without the benefit of the box to tell you what the picture was supposed to look like.  It was exhausting.

Little by little, her vision returned, starting with spotty patches here and there, until one day her eyes fluttered and she was jarred awake, but this time by the brightness.  The beauty.  The baby.  It had a crooked, toothless, smile.  Dimpled cheeks.  Intelligent eyes.  It was clearly hers. She was clearly hers, it was plain to see.  Once she was able to properly observe her, she was able to feel her, in her arms, and in her heart, a heavy pull.  There was a comfortable, weighty presence, where an unnatural weightless void had existed just before. She stared at her, and blinked back tears, squinting at the dazzling view.