Whiteout

I’d been blinded several weeks ago in a chemical accident that burned my corneas white. Right off. I hadn’t felt it when the world went out. In fact, there was no pain to remember, only a bright flash that echoed inside. I heard yelling. A woman next to me said, “Oh my god.” Footsteps approached. Commotion. People around me I no longer saw whispered. I tried to remember what they looked like. My husband I felt in front of me. I tried to remember him. He had his hands on my shoulders. I imagined him seeing only his reflection in my two white orbs. Polished and empty. I imagined my corneas in a pan under high heat, cracking, smoothing over before sliding right off the nonstick. 

Weeks after, my husband knelt in front of me under the heat of a hissing showerhead I only felt. No longer saw. His hand gripped my knee. The other held a razor I heard rinsing under the water pressure. “I don’t want you to cut yourself,” he said, guiding the blade between my legs. I felt the hair come off before the blade hit the pressure. The doctor had said things would be different. Much. That there would be adjustments I’d have to make. Private acts temporarily un-private. “I suppose it depends how you look at it,” the doctor had said. I hadn’t understood when the doctor said this and my husband, seated next to me, had gripped my hand with the one he now had inside me. The other traced outside along the angle of muscle I’d carved. Angles made for his imagination. His breath hot against my neck. “You like it,” he said. It wasn’t a question meant for an answer. I thought then what I must look like, blindly staring into the pounding showerhead as my husband worked his fingers inside; toward what I wasn’t sure.

Before the accident, we were not sexual people. We did it like a task. My husband liked to be orderly, so I learned to be loved in different ways. He liked to touch me after my post-workout shower, my muscles firm, scent clean. He liked to see me post-wax. He liked that raw skin. That tidy proof. My husband wanted me to see a shrink. “Things will be difficult for you,” he said, and this had come true. Where did my body fit into our space? Against the order of our home, as I had once known it, my body became unruly. I made messes that I could not see the end of; and also, I was that mess. I began to relearn my home by holding anything I knocked into in my arms like a baby. I tucked the shapes in my new body. I sat them down again, recoiling at the feeling of my flesh, the filth I’d worked not to see, the animal of myself.

When we fucked, my husband’s body held me in myself. His skin like a lock, the lock a relief. He ran his hands along my shoulders and that soothed me some. I thought they must still be beautiful, surely, to earn his caress. When he entered me I could almost see myself again, a pale stain in my head and there, there, there.

Then it wasn’t in my head. We were fucking in the garage, my back against the cold concrete, my husband heavy on top, and suddenly I could see my breasts. I blinked and still my breasts, my nipples puffed and raw and gleaming with my husband’s spit. I watched myself through his eyes. His hand moved up to my breast. Lingered on the rash of blackheads by the nipple. I felt his squeeze and watched his hand squeezing and pushing upward to my arched head looking for where I saw now. He slammed his weight against me. Deeper. Felt I needed to scream. Needed to stop this vision. Return to dark, but he fucked and fucked and I watched myself open my eyes. Empty whites. They had no color left to see any. They were open and screaming for a mouth that was not. The hand I’d reached out to him I felt in his mouth, against his tongue. He sucked it without looking. His eyes ironed onto my breasts swayed and stretched, and as he came, I felt his grip tighten, and suddenly my face came into his gaze and I was looking into where I saw from with open whites, screaming, screaming. 

I remained silent the following days. He apologized repeatedly. Kept saying, “Did I hurt you? Why didn’t you say anything? I would’ve stopped. I would’ve stopped.” He kept saying it to me in the darkness of a bedroom always dark. I’d said I couldn’t in the moment. Didn’t know what to say. What could be said. Was I even seeing what I saw? I said I hadn’t felt well. Yes? Not well. That there wasn’t anything more. Adjustments. I am. “I’m adjusting,” I came up with finally. 

I hadn’t mentioned to what, assuming it obvious. But I realized I couldn’t tell him how I'd watched him fuck me. How I’d been inside him watching him fuck me. How I knew now that his eyes held the parts of me I tried my best to manage. Me in him, in his eyes, the worst parts of myself. 

I couldn’t explain this new cruelty. It wasn’t the darkness. The sudden flash of my body, twisted like a kitchen rag stayed in my head during those quiet days. I stripped and spent my hours on the garage floor, wondering if the cold had triggered it. I beat my breasts and pushed my fingers deep inside myself. Perhaps it was the pain of having only the feeling of being fucked that had shown me myself. Made me imagine me. Had I imagined me?

I accused my husband of rearranging our lives. Our furniture. I accused him of hiding from me. He had stopped touching me since the garage. He answered my questions slowly and his voice was never steady, always circling the room which meant he was too. Like a broken homing hum. I chased his sound throughout the house like a dog. “Stay put,” he’d say, “I’ll come to you.” And he never did.

       But nights later, after I carefully bathed, dressed myself in a nightgown I knew he loved, when I slept in our room instead of the garage, he let himself inside me. And it happened again. Each thrust and I became a silhouette on the bed, splayed like an animal hit and dead on the side of the road.

       “Look at me,” I said to him. I wanted to see my face and not the spill of stomach, not the hunched curl of my body over my breasts. And he said, “I am,” and it was the mass of hair I had left wild inside my armpits, and I said, “Please,” and needed to watch myself say it, the curl of my lips, the way I looked when I wanted something.

He flipped me onto my stomach. My eyes stayed open against the itch of our pillows. The back of my neck looked silver like a lever, like a handle, like fancy hardware in a rich kitchen. My hand stretched out into the bed to reach for it, to pull it open, and in my husband’s eyes I saw that hand stay empty, grasp at nothing. I watched it go limp. My husband did, too.