See How Dark It Is

Right now my heart was in my throat. Here in the dark room, with just enough light to see the turning door handle. I was definitely frightened. The expected punishment was about to be delivered. Even if my father had tricked me, to see if I would leave the room after I heard the taxi leave. Thinking I could get a brief freedom before he returned. But I had held my ground, through fear. A test. Sneaky. Then the door opened and I could see the shape in the doorway. It was not my father, unless he had shrunk slightly, and changed gender. It was in fact my older sister whom had been left in charge when my parents departed. She stopped and reached out to turn on the light. The room illuminated and there she was. “Why were you sitting in the dark?” she asked.

Why do people do that? Knowing someone is sitting in the dark (something I have actually done to relax from time to time), They don’t ask, “Why are you sitting in the dark?” and wait and, more importantly, listen for your reply. They flood the room with light and while you blink owlishly, they then ask the question. I remember the time I had a minor eye injury (not the other eye injury, see blog March 28 2012 ). I had been told by the doctor who had treated me that afternoon for it, to keep a patch on the eye and only to remove it when I had to put drops in the eye and (of course), only to put drops in the eye in the heavily dimmed room. In fact he said, dark room.

So then, going home to the flat that evening, I closed the bedroom curtains and propped myself up in bed with the eye drop bottle in my hand and only a very faint glow through the curtains from a street light, carefully removed my eye patch tapes.

My girlfriend at the time (who I had only left a message for at her work), came home and as she came upstairs to the bedroom, I called out “Hi! Be right with you” being involved with getting the drops up and into my eye I was distracted until she reached through the door, flicked on the bedroom light and asked…. I suddenly discovered why the doctor wanted me to administer the drops in the dark. The sudden brightness and illumination caused my eye to attempt to focus on something and consequently the movement of the eye muscles and lens caused significant pain. Shortly followed by several expletives, including a simple and clear instruction, “Turn off the bloody light!” which my girlfriend (being uninformed of the injury) momentarily took as a personal verbal attack. Which even once the light was off and the situation calmed took some time to resolve to a point of me having to do all of the apologising to her for my reaction to my further suffering through her actions.

(Continued tomorrow)