“When did it begin?” I asked.

You told me you weren’t sure how many days it had gone on, but a protracted affair with Absolut finally reached its conclusion on the carpet of your living room, lying beneath your stereo. You were on your left side at the threshold of consciousness and could hear the music playing clearly. Then you heard your name. Then again, and a hand on your shoulder pulled you suddenly back to the waking world.

She had come home from work a little after midnight and found you in the exact same position as when she left in the afternoon. She approached you, saying your name, and didn’t panic until she saw that your eyes were open. She shook you by the shoulder and you blinked back to life.

“Oh my god,” she exhaled, “what the fuck? Are you okay?”

“It was not her voice. It was like she breathed the words.”

“Help me up,” you coughed, your mouth and throat like sand, “I cannot see.”

You told me that this was half-true. Your left eye was blind. Your right eye was fine.

You rolled onto your back and sat up, then picked up your left wrist in your right hand.

“Oh.”

Your entire arm was apparently dead. As she got you dressed and found your shoes, helped you into the car, and got the car out of the complex, onto the road, then the highway, you never bothered to mention that your right eye was in perfect working order. She worried that you might be delusional, but she began to believe that you were lying.

“She could see,” she recalled later. “She just stared at her hand, or through it.”

I said nothing.

“It moves,” you said from the passenger seat to her horror.

“The inside of a storm cloud at night. Or a dark room full of nothing but smoke. Extremely dense smoke.”

This was the first visual description you gave me.

“I am sorry,” you said, finally noticing her disturbed expression.

“She lost it.”

Whipping the car onto the right shoulder, she threw it into park and broke down. She hugged the steering wheel tight, facing away from you, sobbing and heaving. You watched her for a moment.

“She was very upset. She had been for a while, but it was all pouring out at once. It was unusual to see her cry. Never so hard.”

Your attention, however, soon slipped back into southpaw. Something very strange was happening on your western front, and you were enchanted. Your left eye was seeing something which was not there, and could not be there. But it was somewhere, it was “grey somehow” and you could see it very clearly, shifting and drifting in ways words fail.

By the time your focus had found its way back into the car, she had regained enough composure to rejoin traffic. Soon, large “E” signs with arrows began appearing alongside you. Then drab architecture. Then the door to the emergency room. The vehicle came to a stop at the curb.

She reached for her seat belt, and you reached for her arm.

“She flinched. I had never seen her like that. Her face and eyes were red, her jaw was clenched. I think she was shaking.”

“Please,” you asked her, “go home.”

She stared at you, dumbstruck. Unable to process what was now happening, she watched you open the door and pull yourself through it.

“She didn’t say anything. She didn’t turn around, or even wave.”

I said nothing.

She sat in shock, and watched you vanish into the vestibule. It might have been the last time she saw you.

But it wasn’t, and she last laid her lucky eyes on yours eight years ago this week.

Closer.