Everyone has their stock stories, the ones they can tell at awkward social moments. Most involve extreme situations or life-changing moments; mine involves neither.
I abruptly woke one typical day four years ago to the maxiumum volume screech of my alarm clock. Immediately, I shot up out of bed, slamming my head against the top of my bunk bed.
“Ow, dammit,” I muttered, pulling myself out of bed and slowly crawling into the bathroom. I hit the light switch. Lights on. Lights off. I hit it again. Lights on. Lights off. Despite my weakened condition, some cognitive component of my brain managed to figure out that the switch was broken so that whenever I pressed it to turn on the lights it would flip back and shut them off.
I sat for a few moments on the bathroom floor pondering what to do. An idea suddenly struck me, and I wandered out of the bathroom. I grabbed a roll of duct tape and, while holding the switch down with one hand, stuck a piece of duct tape on it to hold it down. Stepping back into the room now filled with light, I wiped my hands clean and smiled at a job well done. Jonathan one, bathroom zero.
Several moments later I found myself in the shower shampooing my hair. As luck would have it, a significant amount of shampoo found its way into my eyes.
“Ow, it stings! Ow!” I yelped. My hands immediately shot to the aid of my eyes, rubbing them furiously, but that only made it worse. I stopped rubbing my eyes, but kept them tightly shut. I turned off the water and got out of the shower, my feet hitting the icy cold floor of the bathroom.
I felt around the wall, finally found my towel and began drying my hair and the rest of my body. I suddenly realized that I still had my eyes clenched shut. They had stopped burning as much and I decided to open them.
At the exact moment I opened my eyes, the tape on the wall keeping the light switch down, which had likely been slowly peeling away the entire time, popped off and the switch flipped back into the off position.
As I opened my eyes I found only pitch black.
“Oh God, I’m blind,” I thought as the fear actually set in. I dropped the towel I had been holding and reached my hands up to the ceiling in agony. “I’m blind! I’m blind! Oh God, I’m blind!” I began hollering at the top of my lungs.
My father heard me from the kitchen upstairs and dashed down, ripping open the door to see what all the commotion was about.
There I stood, completely naked, with my hands up in the air, screaming as light flooded the room.
“I can see,” I blurted out before I realized the sheer absurdity of the situation. I turned toward the door to see my father standing there, jaw near his ankles, speechless. “Uh, heh, the..uh…lights went out,” I stuttered, quickly grabbing the towel and rushing past my father into my room. I shut the door and got dressed quickly.
Once dressed, I headed upstairs for breakfast. My father was standing in the kitchen making coffee, and as I sat down to eat some cereal he glanced up for a few moments and shook his head slowly. My father and I have never spoken of the events that transpired that cold winter morning. I think, perhaps, it’s best that way.
