Back when I first started Kindergarten, I met Marissa Williams. Over the first few weeks of school Marissa and I became good friends and confidants, and this was to go on until we both went off to University. At first, we texted, and e mailed each other, but as so often happens we drifted apart. Recently, I met Marissa again and we have since reconnected, so now I can tell you the rest of the story. My mom worked every day, but Marissa’s mom was staying home to look after Luke, Marissa’s 2-year-old brother. I started off going to daycare after kindergarten, but once Marissa’s mom found that out, she offered to let me come to their house to play with Marissa. I am pretty sure my mom gave Marissa’s mom some money every week for looking after me, but I don’t think it was a lot. I know I really enjoyed being at the Williams house far better than I had liked the daycare and I know that Marissa liked having me there as well. Marissa’s mom wore glasses all the time and they looked to be kind of thick. Marissa told me that her mom would often say she couldn’t see past the end of her nose without her glasses. Apparently Marissa’s mom, Lisa, had been a model and a dancer and one time when Marissa and I were asking her about her modelling she told us that she loved the work, but had to give it up when her eyes went bad on her. I didn’t understand how your eyes could go bad all of a sudden and it took me a few years before I found out that what she really meant was that her eyes were so bad that she needed glasses or contact lenses all of the time. She had worn her contacts for far too long every day and finally when her eyes rejected the contacts, she could no longer model, because no one would hire a model with such poor eyesight who was not able to wear contacts. I guess Marissa and I were around 6 years old when we found a box in the closet of Mr. and Mrs. Williams bedroom. This box contained quite a few pairs of Mrs. Williams’s old glasses. Of course, Marissa and I experimented with putting on various pairs of glasses, but they were really hard for us to see much more than a gigantic blur of things through the lenses. That didn’t stop us from trying to wear them and attempting to walk around and do things with them on. Sometimes we would each take a pair back to Marissa’s room and play while we were wearing them, pretending we were grown up and really needed to wear glasses. We had a lot of fun, wearing such strong glasses and not being able to see anything clearly. But we both found that the more we wore the strong glasses the better we got at what I now call blur interpretation. We could both walk around without bumping into things, although if something was on the floor we would often stumble or trip over it, but we could find furniture and doorways and we would often go to the bathroom without removing the glasses we had on. I doubt that either one of us wore glasses for more than maybe 3 or 4 hours a week. This went on for around 2 years and it stopped when Marissa had to get her own glasses. I was afraid to wear Mrs. Williams’s old glasses anymore in case they ruined my eyes like they had Marissa’s. Yes, we were both certain that this was why Marissa needed glasses, and I felt I was lucky that I had stopped before I also needed to wear glasses. But then, the following year when I was 9 it was discovered that I also needed glasses and my first pair of glasses was stronger than Marissa’s were. We were now both just nearsighted enough to have to wear glasses that seemed to have to get stronger every year. By the time we were 13 both Marissa and I were totally dependent on glasses to enable us to see anything. Neither of us really minded that, and actually we had once again started experimenting with different pairs of Mrs. Williams’s old glasses again. There was one pair that had such an exquisite frame that Marissa wore them to school as often as she possibly could. This time she wore them so much that her eyes seemed to fully adapt to the power of the lenses. By now her own lenses were too weak for them to be of much use to her, and this pair was just about the weakest prescription of her mom’s old glasses that she could wear and still see well through. Marissa liked the feeling of over correction so much she found a bit stronger pair of her mom’s glasses that she liked the looks of. I then wore the ones with the exquisite frame for the next year in school. I don’t know if I was lucky that my parents both worked full time or not. They hardly had time for me, and I bet they really didn’t see the real me around the house. I tried wearing that rather fancy and exquisite pair of glasses around the house in front of my parents and they didn’t even notice, so I ended up wearing them more and more of the time. I didn’t know for sure what Marissa’s prescription had been after she had worn these glasses, but when I went back to the eye doctor for a checkup before I went back to school that year my new prescription was -9.50D. The exquisite glasses were still stronger, but they were so easy to wear now that I just kept wearing them. Marissa had worn that other old pair of her mom’s glasses full time in school, but she could only get away with intermittent wear at home. Her mom was always home, and even though I didn’t have to go there after school anymore, whenever I did, I also had to change back to my own real glasses. Marisa got into the habit of coming to my place after school now so that she could keep wearing her mom’s old glasses for a while longer each day. My parents never noticed me, so it was doubtful that they would notice her either. I had taken another pair of glasses from her mom’s collection, and it was a much stronger pair than the pair Marissa was wearing. Marissa couldn’t see very well when she first tried them, but I could easily force my eyes to see through the lenses and so we figured out that because I was able to wear her mom’s old glasses almost all the time my eyes had adapted to the prescription better. We both liked wearing the thicker glasses and we figured that once you needed glasses then it didn’t matter how thick they had to be. And we both liked our appearance with the thicker glasses, although Marissa was kind of sad that I could wear her mom’s thicker glasses when she couldn’t. I think I was the one who came up with the idea that if we took the strongest pair of her mom’s glasses that Marissa could make her eyes see clearly through and went to an optical store with Marissa wearing them we could likely buy Marissa a new frame identical to the frame she was wearing her own prescription in and have them duplicate the prescription. Then Marissa could wear them all of the time like I did, and her eyes would get used to them like mine had. Marissa then wanted to do this wearing the glasses that I had been wearing, so I ended up going to the optical shop with her while I was wearing the other glasses she had been wearing as often as she could. The glasses with the exquisite frame had been stronger than my real glasses with the -9.50D prescription, but they were now too weak for either of us to wear. And the pair Marissa was now wearing were even stronger still, but my eyes had not fully adapted to them yet. When I put on the ones Marissa had worn to go to the optical store, I discovered that my vision was just about perfect when I wore them. And Marissa found that, while the lenses were still a bit too strong for her to wear comfortably, the glasses I had been wearing could now be worn by her with a little bit of effort. We pooled our allowance money, and everything worked perfectly for us except that because the prescription was so strong Marissa ended up having to wait almost 2 weeks before her new glasses came in. I was a little upset that she wanted to keep wearing the glasses that she had worn to the optical store because she wanted to try to get used to the same prescription that her new glasses were before she had to start wearing them. But I was able to wear the weaker ones and they really were just perfect for me. When Marissa picked up the new glasses, they looked identical to her own, but the stronger lenses were noticeable and we hoped her parents wouldn’t spot that. When she got her invoice with the glasses it had the prescription written on it so that is how we found out we would both be wearing glasses with -15D lenses. And what was really neat was that we were both 15 now. Marissa gave me back her mom’s old glasses and I was again wearing them all the time. By now neither Marissa nor I could see much of anything without our glasses. It had reached the point where instead of wearing stronger pairs of her mom’s glasses we would just take off our own glasses and go around without them. It was almost as much fun doing it this way, as things were pretty fuzzy when we didn’t have our glasses on. We could still see stuff ok, albeit blurred. We had both turned 15 and we were just starting to be noticed by boys. We wondered if our glasses would turn the guys off, but they didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that both Marissa and I wore pretty thick glasses. About a year later we did decide that we should have our eyes examined, get ourselves the proper glasses and quit messing around with Marissa’s mom’s old glasses. Neither of us was too surprised when we did have our eyes examined and we both needed exactly the same prescription. We chose different, but very nice-looking frames and had our now -16D lenses done in a thinner lens material so our glasses didn’t look quite as thick as they might have otherwise. We planned to switch glasses whenever one of us felt like it, because our prescriptions were identical. Of course, the first time we swapped glasses Marissa’s mom noticed immediately. That is when she found out that Marissa and I had identical prescriptions. And then of course she had to try on our glasses. That’s when she found out that Marissa and I had almost as strong a prescription as she had. I think that is when she figured out what we had been doing, but she didn’t seem to be very upset at us. She just said that she hoped that we had gotten what we wanted, and we told her that we had. After that she called us “Two Peas in a Pod.” It was wonderful to see Marissa once again after she had gotten her degree. She was staying with her mom until she found a job, and while I hoped that she would find work a little closer to where I lived, I knew that she would go wherever she had to. And, the funny thing was, that after we both had gone to university, our now -20D prescriptions were still close enough that we could switch glasses. We really were two peas in a pod. Specs4ever Jan 2019