The crosswalk light ticks 12 times. I know the light is green now and I begin to cross the street. Dogs bark, cars honk, the streets smell of morning coffee. My cane bumps the curb and I stumble up the step. Ugh. Third time today. The noisy street soon muffles into soft murmurs. I glide my fingers over the wall to decipher my destination- the Braille reads: ‘Dr. Harp- room 407’. In the elevator, my stomach leaps into a back-handspring and my knees support my body like a shaky trampoline. Today is the day.

I feel my body buzz with nerves. As I lie on the bed in my gown waiting for the nurse, I practice my nerve-calming exercises. I check out my surroundings and get in touch with my four senses. I feel the sheets on the bed. I taste my dry mouth and morning breath. I hear shoes squeaking on the hallway floors and the sounds of machines. I smell a mixture of hand sanitizer, latex gloves, and then, warm vanilla. The scent gets stronger and stronger and soothes me further with the sound of a soft, gentle voice.

“Mr. Hansen- I am going to put you down soon. Choose a flavor for your laughing gas”.

“I choose your perfume please. Mmm”

She chuckles. Her laugh is perfect.

“No can do but bubble gum is the closest to that”.

I don’t know what it is but I feel a connection to this girl, this nurse. There is something about her aura--her scent and her sound-- it urges me to feel safe in my vulnerability. I feel my face getting hot and a giant lump forms in the back of my throat. “I have been waiting for this surgery for 23 years. 23 goddamn years. What if it doesn’t work?”

My mind quickly transforms into a rollercoaster of sound. All of my memories are in sounds. Sometimes the sounds take over my whole body and cause me to hyperventilate. My train of sound is riding 80 miles per hour. It halts to the voice of the soother, “I believe this surgery will be successful. And if not, I believe even more that what you have inside you is far more powerful than anything a surgery can fix.” I sense sadness and a tremor in her voice.

The vanilla scent weakens and I yearn for it to come back. I yearn for her comfort. I think about her words and my anxiety soon turns into excitement. I possess a newfound hope in the fact that I actually might be able to come out of this successfully. I smell the vanilla wafting into the room. I am ready.

“See you in 3 hours, Mr. Hansen. See you.”

“See you...___?”

“ Amelia”

My heart jumps. She is beautiful. The needle penetrates my arm. I fall unconscious.

Blur                  

                           motion

                                                              Light

The hand sanitizer is no longer a smell it is a figure. The latex gloves glow with color. The sounds of the squeaky hallways turn into shapes of shoes gliding over the glossy reflective ground. I look around and I see people. I SEE! The figures in the distance create motion with lanky odd movements. They seem to all move with the same flow of movements, yet there is diversity within the flow. I marvel at the perfect imperfections of each distant body and I long to see a face up close. I blink. There is no longer a sheet of darkness hovering over me. I am engulfed in the wonder of sight but suddenly smell the vanilla and I glance up to meet it with my eyes for the first time.

Each feature on her face is distinct. Her eyes, one large and one small, fall in a diagonal line. Her nose leans all the way to the small eye and looks flat against her face. Her lips curve to the left and a tooth sticks out at the right corner of her mouth. One ear flaps out and the other is curled into a small ball, barely visible from the front. She is so beautiful.

“Amelia!”

She pretends not to hear me and quickly rushes the other way. Several doctors and nurses pass by my hospital room. And that’s when I notice. All of their faces look relatively the same. All of their features are aligned and relatively symmetrical in the same areas. I picture Amelia in my mind and blink several times. I close my eyes to retrieve my sheet of darkness and tune into the sound of her words, ‘What you have inside you is far more powerful than anything a surgery can fix.’ It is all coming together now. Her face is deformed. The doctor unplugs the machines from my body. I run across the hallway, hands dangling free, no cane, no sheet of darkness. Enlightenment.

“Amelia. Will you go out with me?”