I have started reading a book “All the light we cannot see” a war novel by Antony Doerr. The book introduces a character, Marie, who suffers from rapid vision degeneration and eventually goes blind. I want to make an attempt at writing a short scene in the daily life of Marie. I had a range of emotions while i was reading, hence back to the keyboard. This is me sticking to my writing.

Waking up and not waking up at the same time, recalling the times when light was seen and not heard. The blur in my eyes would clear to the haze of smoky skies, that was the truth for the last month, and since then my truth has been changing daily. Darker with every passing day. Relying strongly on rest of my senses, gripping everything as if it were to stop me from the inevitable fall. Every step that i take feels like a step in the unknown, my toes bumping into the corners of my bed, cries of pain, and silent calls for help all go numb, the moment i remind myself of the truth.

The next morning, Marie woke up to the pungent smell of the factory nearby, the whir of a distant motor vehicle, and the sound of crackling leaves. She raised her hands to rub her eyes and stopped midway, she had given up, partly accepted that this was how her mornings would be. Gathering courage from right from the middle of the bed, she searched for an edge, her friendly right. While she found her right slipper right below her leg, for next few moments there was a frantic effort to find the other one, until she did. “Now five paces straight” she whispered to herself - the bathroom, she made sure she was at a hand’s distance from the end of the bed that was away from the wall. With the belief that objects do not move, she takes her first step, and the next and the next, only to realize her third step was a bit longer than her last two, accounting for that with her right hand stretched and the left grabbing thin air she strode and reached her destination early, as she had anticipated.

As she opened the tap slightly, water came out gushing at first then sputters of air and water, she waited, and what followed was a series of wasted efforts to turn the tap, hurting her hand in the process and a single drop of water that she heard. She sunk to her knees to sit on a wet floor, holding on to herself with her arms, screaming with her mouth wide open but no sound was heard, instead a gasp, a cry for help faded into a dried tear.

Sagar Sarkale