I like to reminisce about girls with glasses I’ve known over the years. I’ve dated a dozen or so women and six of them have been nearsighted. I’ve never chosen my dates based on glasses but the proportion is still somewhat high. I read somewhere that only 28% of my generation are myopic. I like geeky girls so maybe that explains it. In my early twenties, I had a few months’ fling with an aspiring poet/musician. She was dark, petite and very beautiful in an innocent way, undoubtedly admired by many. Certainly I’d had a crush on her for ages. She didn’t wear glasses and I didn’t even know she was shortsighted. To my astonishment, she showed interest in me and we started hanging out together. When we spent our first night together (and just before we had sex for the first time), she came back from the bathroom wearing glasses. I was used to being the blindest person in the room myself with my -5 prescription, so I said, “Oh you wear glasses too. I’m sure you are not as blind as me, though.” ”Well, actually I am totally blind”, she said sheepishly. She told me her eyes were around -6. I took a closer look and noticed the power rings in her purple plastic frames. I was mesmerized. She told me she really disliked wearing glasses but now felt comfortable wearing them in front of me. We kissed, and soon her shirt and bra came off. In public, she almost always wore contacts. However, I got a glimpse of here private side when she switched to glasses after a long day or temporarily didn’t wear any correction. She used to put on her makeup in her underwear in front of a large mirror, with her eyes nearly touching it, while she chatted with me. Now and then, she would put on her glasses to see what the makeup looked like, then take them off and continue, at times bringing her makeup bag so close to her face her small nose nearly went in it. Even though she was clearly completely dependent on vision correction, she would sometimes hang out bare-eyed at home. Maybe she found it hot? At least I did. Or mostly likely she just didn’t care. For example, I had my TV at the foot of my bed, and once she was sitting without correction at the opposite side of the bed several feet away from the TV completely naked. I was at my desk and mentioned there was a really handsome man on the TV. She said, “I want to see that” and crawled across the bed right up to the TV set, her butt pointed upwards. She sat there like a cat, watching the show just a few inches from the screen from an angle where she could maximize her clear range of vision - I’ve noticed severely nearsighted people have a way of looking at things at a certain angle to capture as much as possible. She said something about the handsome man, then backed out to the other side of the bed and withdrew into the blur. I thought it was sexy that she still just continued chatting with me without putting her glasses on. I hoped that she’d get interested in the show again so I kept talking about it, but she at most glanced at the direction of the TV without interest. Once she brought up the subject of getting glasses as a kid. She told me that she’d resisted wearing glasses full time when she didn’t need them for everything yet and asked me if I’d done the same. I told I’d just wore them all time from the start. She told me she couldn’t figure out why people did that if they didn’t need glasses all the time. For some reason I couldn’t summon up the courage to ask when she’d gone full time then. Instead, she went on to detail a lesson where she was sitting at the back of the class with a friend who was also nearsighted and they were both unable to see the board because their prescriptions were out of date. She found it hilarious that they were so out of it that they couldn’t even read the board. At some point, we made an exciting trip to a spa. What made it exciting was that she had run out of contacts the day before and decided to swim bare-eyed. For some reason, we both found the idea of wearing glasses in the spa uncool, and so I left my glasses in the locker too. I knew this was going to be fun. Even when we came out of the showers and had to meet by the pools, we had trouble finding each other. I thought I recognized her from her blue bikini but couldn’t be sure until I was right next to her. She was a bit freaked out and said I was just a blob to her and she couldn’t even recognize me until I spoke. She described how she couldn’t tell if there were people in one of the rooms on the side or not. To tell the truth, I couldn’t either. We felt isolated from everybody else. In the pool, she marveled at all the lights that seemed like giant stars to her myopic eyes. She asked me where the bar was, and I couldn’t tell. We got out of the pool to search for it, and we took each other’s hand to feel safer. I think once in a while she scrunched up her eyes to try and make out something in the distance, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t see her face that well. Without being able to read any signs, we found the bar. There were some colorful pieces of paper on the bar and she asked me: “Is that the menu? Your eyesight is a bit better than mine.” She treated me as the eagle-eyed one because of the -1 difference in our prescriptions. I had to bend over the sheets to see them properly, and it was indeed the drinks menu. “I’ll just take whatever you take so we don’t look like douchebags,” she said. Maybe she was just a bit embarrassed for us, but I found it interesting that she considered herself too blind to even read the menu. We proceeded to ride the water slides and swim a lot - so there was actually some sense in our decision to leave our glasses in the lockers. On the way home, I remarked that it was great to see sharp again. She replied that she would never ever visit a spa without contacts again. Not being able to see had made the experience less fun for her, and I understood that completely. I remember her remarking that there had been a woman with breast implants in the shower. Well at least she could see something then, I thought. Her embarrassment with her vision continued to show up now and then. One night, we drank a lot of wine and read a book to each other on the bed. At some point, she took off her glasses and continued to read by keeping the book very close to her eyes. Her eyesight was still good enough that she didn’t have to close one eye to focus. Next day, she couldn’t remember it all very well and for some reason asked me if she had worn her glasses when reading the book. “No, you didn’t,” I replied. “Well, I guess I just brought the book close enough,” she said, somehow troubled. I’m not sure why she found this detail important. I remember one time when she was about to lean into the computer screen bare-eyed to read something. When she noticed what she was doing, she backed out and fetched her glasses. I thought she was worried that leaning in would look ungainly. I also remember one time when she was searching for her glasses in her room while getting dressed. The glasses were supposed to be on the table, and she hunched down close to it and hoovered the surface with her eyes. I told her that the glasses weren’t there. She asked if I knew where they were, but I didn’t. She looked around hazily and continued getting dressed, almost as if she had decided she didn’t need those damn spectacles anyway, and then stormed off to the bathroom to put her contacts in. When she came back, she immediately saw the glasses on the window sill. I have one particularly exciting memory of her. We were lying on my bed when a crow suddenly landed in front of the window about ten feet away from us. I was wearing my glasses while she wasn’t, and I said, ”Wow, look at that!” The bird seemed huge and out of proportion. She looked up and did something I will never forget: she raised an index finger and stretched her left eyelid into a tight squint to look at the crow. For a while we admired the bird, or actually I admired her from the corner of my eye. Then I turned to look at her. She immediately released the eyelid and continued to look at the bird normally. I got the impression she had forgotten herself for a while but I had made her self-conscious. For a long time I kept thinking: the bird was so big, and she still needed to pull her eye into a slit to see it! She knows the eye pulling trick! I regret that I didn’t try bring up the subject with her. Luckily, I also have another similar memory of her. We were having sex on the couch in the kitchen. We’d already reached the climax and she was lying on top of me, her small breasts pressed against my chest. There was a clock on the wall just a few away from us, and she squinted quickly and absentmindedly at it. It was clearly no use, because then she used her slender knuckles to pull her eyelid taut for a few seconds, just long enough to focus and tell the time. She did this in front of me, and I believe that had our relationship lasted longer, I would have seen more of this.
At the time, I couldn’t quite appreciate just how special our relationship was regarding my fascination with glasses and squinting. Even if these moments were only passing and she wore contacts or glasses most of the time, she was almost too good to be true.