A Tale Too Dumb for The Twilight Zone

I wear glasses. I have since I was about 10 years old. Yeah, I was one of those dorky kids that got called "Four-Eyes." Don't get me wrong, I wasn't dorky because I wore glasses. I was dorky because I was a dork. The glasses just made it easier for the mean kids to settle on a nickname. 

In high school I switched to contact lenses, which wasn't the transformative moment that movies and TV would have us believe ("Why, Molly, if you'd just take off those glasses and let your hair down, you'd be beautiful." Not how it works outside of "The Brady Bunch" and softcore porn.) But it did make me feel a bit better about myself, which led to having a smidge more self-confidence, which helped me find my own personal style, which...you get the picture. True beauty, like flatulence, comes from within.

Just ask Marilyn, who I'm told was a fan
of beans.

Fast-forward to the present day. I gave up on contacts years ago because lenses to correct my astigmatic eyeballs would be hella expensive and also I'm too lazy to take care of them properly (the lenses, not the eyeballs...although probably them, as well). So I wear glasses every day. And I don't like my current frames. I mean, I really don't like them. They resemble the glasses Michael Douglas wore in "Falling Down," and I don't know why I thought that was a good look for a middle-aged woman.

My crew cut looks better, tho.

I had different frames a few years back. I hated those, too. Guys, I'm so bad at making decisions. I'll try on 30 pairs of glasses at the store, second- and third- and eighteenth-guess myself, and ultimately go with something that feels safe and unremarkable...and doesn't suit me at all.

This, by the way, bodes SO WELL for me trying to buy a home.

"OMG, it's perfect." - my dumb ass, probably

But the frames I had before all of those...I loved them. I really, really loved them. When I look at photos of me in those glasses, I look so good. And not just because those photos are almost 10 years old. I'm probably less cute now than I was 10 years ago, but not that much less cute. 

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

For quite a while I've wished I could take those frames back to the store, get new lenses put in, and be happy. But I can't. Because I lost them.

I don't throw old glasses away. I'm a pack rat. I still have 3.5" floppy disks and external hard drives that don't work with any computer manufactured in this century. Don't get me started on mixtapes that I lack a device to play them on (on which to play them...skip it) and that by now would probably sound like lo-fi whale calls if I did. 

And are as fragile as my ego, to boot.

Yet I somehow managed to lose these remarkable frames. Oh, I've searched for them. Every time I stumble across an eyeglass case - in a desk drawer, a closet, a random box of memorabilia - I check it out. It'll be an old pair of mine, or an old pair of Precocious Daughter's, but never THE ONES. They're just gone...

...is what I thought until a few days ago.

One end of my kitchen island is home to a random assemblage of stuff. It's not a trash heap of impenetrable layers. I can see everything, and if there's something there I actually need, I can put my hands on it right away. I do mostly ignore it on a daily basis, because I'm good at things like that.

A few days ago I was tidying up a bit, and my eye fell on a glasses case sitting among the random items on my island. I've seen it before. I've opened it before, hoping my lost frames were inside. Which they were not. They abso-fucking-lutely were not, any of the times I looked.

Except a few days ago, they were.

Now, I'm a fan of "glitch in the matrix" stories that proliferate on the internet. They're good for a shiver down the spine, like reading a ghost story or kicking a heavy object in the middle of the night (bookmark that for future post, btw). But I don't really believe they actually happen, or that they can't be easily explained away.

So the glasses were undoubtedly there the whole time, and I didn't check the case because I assumed I had checked it previously. That's all. 

But they weren't. They just weren't.

Look, it's far easier to believe that my resident ghost slipped them in when I wasn't looking, or that the very fabric of reality unraveled just enough to allow their passage between alternate planes of existence, than to admit that I'm as foolish and addled as I feel after making my discovery.

Me, now.

To whatever spirit or force or cluster of fried brain cells returned my old glasses to me...thank you. This makes me happy. 

If you wanted to return my youth, my 26-inch waist, or my unblemished liver, I'd be OK with that, too.