DIRTY EYES

I rubbed my eyes and squinted at my laptop screen through a slight blur that was irritating me. Earlier I’d been to the local market down the hill and now, as darkness fell across the Himilayas, I was having to deal with the dust in my eyes kicked up from the soup of people, vehicles, and animals that sway and swirl on the busy narrow roads of that Indian hillside town.

This is a beautiful country for sure. Vivid, noisy, and aromatic, India is a veritable assault on the senses. You can’t be in India in the same way as you can be anywhere else. In India, you have to get comfortable with the fact that this isn’t so much a place you visit, but more like something that happens to you. And it was happening to me; the chaos, the wonder, and the dust in my eyes that was now driving me mad.

I spend a lot of time looking at screens, we all do I suppose. So I thought if it wasn’t a case of my eyes being dirty, maybe they were just tired. Is that even a thing? I heard someone sing about it before, but I suspect that had more to do with love than optometry.

Maybe my eyes were tired because there was so much around me that was new and unfamiliar? There were temples and tea houses, monkeys climbing on walls covered with stains and crumbling paint, a beautiful decay that seemed to sum up so much around me.