Manhattan, New York, 1976
I thought my vision was blurry because of a lack of sleep but it turns out I was going blind. That’s what the doctor said at least - he used the term inoperable. ‘An inoperable cataract’ he said verbatim, ‘seldom seen in such a young man’.
Instantly there's such a voice created! Your full stop needs to go inside the quotation mark, at the end 
I began to look out the window, as the doctor’s ramblings of how the cataract might be treatable or how sorry he was for me,
I? I droned off? Missing something here...droned off. I looked at the sun and how it bounced off the water, elegantly, with poise and incredible form and with that I’m taken back to a different time, a time of no blindness. In fact, I’m taken back to a time of profound vision.
Coney Island, New York City, 1962
I had just graduated from the New York Academy of Arts and had found a job as a Coney Island boardwalk painter, painting caricatures and portraits of the people that’d pass by.
I’d sit by the ferris wheel, a camel
If you're referring to the brand Camel, it needs capitalisation cigarette dangling in the corner of my mouth while flailing my button up shirt as the sun kissed me with an intense heat.
Sometimes I’d have a couple people show up to have their picture painted. Sometimes it was an elderly woman who would spend her time walking the pier, sometimes it was a pair of lovers spending the afternoon together, sometimes it was an excited child fidgeting and waiting for me to finish.
But most of the time there was no one at all. Most of the time I was by myself, occupied with my thoughts. I’d look out at the ocean and think to myself. Watching the tides crash against the shore, I thought about my life and where it was headed, I thought about who I was going to be and all the places that I’d see.
When I suspected no one was going to show for the rest of the day, I’d paint the boardwalk. I’d paint the people walking across it and while I did, I wondered who they were and how they lived their lives. I’d paint the carousel and the man with the red-striped blazer selling balloons. I’d paint the mariachi band and the women, in one-piece swimsuits, sunbathing under green and yellow parasols.
Most importantly though, I’d try and capture Coney Island, in all its fantasy and beauty. I’d try and capture the spectrum of colours it housed. Here I was, twenty-two years old, trying to capture the vivacity in this beautiful life; this life of colour.
What a stunning, old school image you've created. Manhattan, New York, 1976
My wife seemed angry. Whether she was angry at me, angry at God, angry at the doctors, I don’t know. Usually, at the pictures,
No need for the two commas in this sentence. you’d see blind men coddled and given sympathetic sighs when they’d pass down the streets but I guess that’s just it; everything I know about blind people is from the movies.
I couldn’t blame her though. She was now married to a man who was losing his vision. She was now married to a man who could not complement her every day, a man who could no longer appreciate the crevices that formed around her mouth when she smiled.
She was married to a man whose eyes she would come to not see herself in.
I tried to catch up with her and just talk things out but she just kept going faster and faster. I guess she saw her future as one riddled with learning braille, and feeding the guide-dog and picking up fucking eye-drops every week. There was a care-free time in our lives; a time when we were both happy. I suppose it started when she sat on the stool adjacent to me, flashed her pearly whites and asked for a painting.
I love the way this is coming together!!!Coney Island, New York City, 1965
We bought an apartment overlooking the amusement park. Sometimes, late at night, we’d sit in the balcony on our foldable chairs, drinking cheap beer and watching the lights; lights that watched us sleep.
We had eloped a year ago; not because we were some Beatniks who ran away from home but just because we couldn’t be fussed with the reception, and the bouquets and the formalities. We just wanted to be married and have it be done.
Since then, life was going pretty good. I wasn’t doing the whole boardwalk painting thing and was earning well working at some gallery. Everything was OK, except for that little incident a month back - the whole miscarriage blunder.
I had made the mistake of bringing up the possibility of re-trying that night but she just wept. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a kid; in fact, she’d give her life up for one but it was that she never wanted to get so close and fall short again.
I tried to console her as best I could, held her in my arms as she fell asleep. I flamed a Camel cigarette and had my eyes drift towards the portrait I had painted her the day we met. Looking at that, and then the lights that pervaded through our open curtains and then the tear-stained puddle on my shirt, I knew shades of black and white were as dangerous as all the colours of the rainbow.
Coney Island, New York City, 1977
I hopped off the Subway and made my way for the amusement park. I had to see it before I completely lost my sight but things weren’t so good now, as my vision became increasingly blurry.
It was forecasted to rain and so no one was on the pier or the beach. I held on to the railing as I strode down the aisle, looking at all the locked food trucks and closed carnival games.
As I made my way further down, I saw the area where I used to do my paintings and the place where I had won that big stuffed giraffe for my wife. I saw where the women would set up their parasols and where the man with the red-striped blazer would sell balloons. I saw where kids used to line up for cotton candy and where young, rosy-cheeked men sought to woo their women at the ring toss.
Most importantly, as I held onto the railing and slid my walking stick along the wooden floorboards, I squinted to see as the sky met the ocean in diaphanous folds and was reminded of this life of colour.
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Topic: Free AOS Creative Writing Marking! (Read 286169 times)