The never-ending string in my eyeball

This time, the shadow peers into a shaving mirror.

He looks thin, tired. Air humidifies the glint of light, lukewarm, tap-warm, spit-sorrowed sun clearing in through the window of the timeless day. The shadow's face burns. It doesn't look like his face, but some ancient reconstruction of it, a dread simulacrum, demurral petroleum, fatigue sclerotium. He remembered the time, several years ago, when the optician told him that he had scarred his eyes with corneal pannus, the extensive pathologic ingrowth of vessels from the 'limbal vascular plexus into the cornea', its oxygen-deprived neovascularisation subsiding vision, ornamental white ring of death, and with it, a severe decrease to eyesight, sensitivity, blindness. What's this? A small piece of string or ivy-rooted thicket, precipice kingdom, juts from under his palpebral crease like a tiny thorn from the sclera. Sparrow, you hide in my eye, he says; why are you there?

With the slightest grip between his shadow thumb and index finger, he shifts the strange tail and realises that it will not move left or right. Instead, the ivory-feather whiteness feels as if one might tug on a piece of string undulating from the brain. My brain, his brain, imprisoned: so full, force-fed heart, synapses hammering with what hasn't been but could very well be, what is yet unapplied, non-existent yet perpetually there, flitting about in the background of the weary and the tired. What to do, to balance this log on the firmament of your being? In the here and now, the most cloudless of the hot summer afternoons? This has been growing for a while, only somewhat dormant at times, only now emerging like a sorrow bloom. An irritation grows, itching the fishhook of bygone colours and feelings. If it remains there, then it remains an irritation, and then what does he do? Accept the gnawing at the insides of the cranium, walk down the labyrinthine corridors and their gardens of trenches beyond the stone windows of my innermost meditations. With such an unravelling, it will hurt. It will destroy you, it will create you. But left untended, it will only spread. And so, gripping the rooted ivy, I pull, pull, pull.

At first, it is only, merely, unusual. The feeling of hair behind the eye unravelling, searching, doorless in its attentive journey. Here it comes, here it comes, surely, my inner voice says. He waits for the end, the satisfying void of emptiness fills the tear ducts to the brim with yearning, creative anguish and the slight pang of heartache for an unknown memory. Any moment now, he thinks, it would end. Any moment now. Keep going, keep... ah... fuck... almost there. But it doesn't come. Deeper, his fingers root into his eye, the crimson pupillary defect swelling with the exit of endless string stone incision, friction martini garnished with existential gore. Feathers (or are they branches? Roots?) grow from its tunnel of yarn, falling eye of the red bloody socket. He dares not touch it anymore, in case it falls out altogether, and then I wouldn't be able to stop my brain from following, a torrent of my future thoughts, into my disregarded lap where beneath the sun falls in tandem with the quiet summer maelstrom.

He stops, I stop. We look into the mirror through the same eyes. The swelling capitulates in its eternal wound, the sling string thorn-branch, white as our left eye's sclera, dangles carelessly by my cheek. When the optician dyed our eyes and the colour bits into the yellowed night I thought I could peer around inside a puddle, vision reflected like lights from the distant city, underside. So the question arises, when the string can't be pulled, or it is pulled in the knowledge that the forcing of that same string results in the viewer's death, what then can we do? How do we continue with the impenetrable anomaly on our fatigue-ridden face?

The day passes. Day in the life of One-Eye Blodin, bullshit Odin, hullo godless gaze of the eternal head of the cobra tooth piercing your soul, emodin. Your process of thought is infinitely coloured by the presence of Hades' string, recognise me, hanging bubble bulge. What's that? In the window pane, now? Is it a reflection of a shadow, seeing into myself truthfully, or negatively? Or is it Dr Corneus Hades — Hell's Optician, but at least he tells the truth — granted, with the painting of my soul in red I cry tears of blood upon the work, and I awake in a sweat and my eye never ever feels the same, never spotless, always seeing something that isn't there. Perception with that irritation, bolt upright in bed, climbing over to examine the blood eye in my bread-knife shadow.

Shade of myself, you there?

Yes, he answers.

Do I still have an eye? Can I still see?

Yes.

Then what just happened?

I dunno.

What did I just experience that made my pain receptors vulgar and flick against the soft tissue of my eyeball? I thought I'd lost a part of myself.

Maybe it was the sunlight trapped between the curtain and the window, where you lay your head and looked directly into the sun.

Or maybe not. Maybe that was just the glint in the shaving mirror.

I climb up the tower of my shaking heart, the castle of waning fire. All the while, I feel the plunging discomfort in my right socket, and look into the mirror again. I am the shadow with a bloody eye, the hanging string residing, its curious flicking movement. But no, it is a phantom of a vision. Looking there now, there is nothing. Just an eye. My shade peers deeper into the right sclera in the hope of envisioning just a hint of the jutting precipice of the thorn and the dull brutish glean of agony, spiritual, physical, eroding the cavity between eye and brain. It was there, so tangible, so impenetrable that one could hold it like a lead and then maliciously hold my brain. Tug tug tug, internal fleshy thought-train. No. No longer a cavity, but space so full of everything and nothing, all-encompassing nebulae. The cavity is a simulacrum of a feeling, the projected image of a prison, nothing more.

The doctor glances into the silence.

Perhaps you won't go blind, he says.