The last encounter of light with my eyes happened one August day, my eleventh year of inhabiting this planet, and it was the epicenter of a wanton prank, harmless and unnecessary, like countless such in every childhood. The sun was large and yellow, the sky deep and blue, and our play unruly, endless and a rolling ball. He passes to me, I pass back, run, pass, watch your back and...

Pain, long and powerful, like a slide-chute one has sunk through and falls into an unrepeatable black void, and then silence framed by waiting for a first move, the chorus of the day, the essential child's laughter. I lay on the grass with no sense of self and thought of the grass under me, soft and green as always before. I am bombarded with alarmed questions, raised by friends' hands, and I can't seem to lose that blackest hole, can't seem to free myself of it and throw it off like a sticky insect shading light from me with its all-encompassing wings. My whole being becomes a spasm, squeezing the hand of my younger brother and rolling back home, into at least a kind of safety and calm.

All that happened later in me stayed an intangible knot, a mess of different intertangled events, contents and signs. The hospital, sounds of morning, the sun only being warm, rain murmuring but not having drops. I adjusted to my new world, adjusted and waited how my my parents would decide, how they wouldframe and give meaning to my future Me.

And they walked the path of prejudice, crying and confused, often stopped by neighbors and family members, questioned and pitied, directed to quacks, herbalists and other miracle-makers, waiting for something to happen on its own, for the ‘medicine’ to work and the darkness to pass. There was no Internet, there were no powerful media of the “global village”, no lasers or other medical miracles, nothing but the daily life I grew accustomed to, leaning on the radio and anticipating my purposeless day.