Wait for the Storm

It’s as simple as putting a candle to a flame. Just open your eyes and see.
It was always that simple for everyone but me.
I would get blurred images, fuzzy black ink bots across my eyes, but most of all, darkness.

“Come on, Andi, just look at the camera and smile. Show me that beautiful smile of yours.” I stared at the ground, watching the dull green grass shift and shudder through my eyes. My best friend stood in front of me, camera in hand, an aspiring photographer, and I was his chosen model.

“I can’t smile Mitchell when I don’t know how it looks on me,” his footsteps echoed as he crunched twigs and leaves beneath him. An arm wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me into him. He sat us down on the dry, broken grass that winter in Ohio normally brought for us.

“Andi, look up for me, okay? And tell me what you see,” I tilted my head towards the sky, feeling the faint warmth of the sun on my face through the biting chill of the breeze that blew through our small town. The colorless clouds floated along, merging into black edges and blurry moments. It took almost five minutes for everything to go blank.

“I see absolutely nothing, Mitchell, like always,” he sighed, leaning his head against my shoulder as I let the palms of my hands support me and keep me away from the cold ground.

“What did you see before it went blank?”

“Colorless clouds and the most washed out blue in the entire world.” I flinched as his hand stole mine from the ground and was wrapped in his.

“I knew you could see, Andi, I knew it. Just because your eyes aren’t brown anymore doesn’t mean you’re blind. That accident changed nothing, you could always see, before and after.” I sighed, letting him put my head against his chest, his excited and bubbly voice filling the cold air. The breeze bit at our exposed faces and fingers, making the trees sway back and forth, whirring through the forest above us and howling in our ears. There was a storm on the way, I could tell by how hard it got to breathe suddenly, and how fast the wind was now making its way through the clearing.

“I think we should go…” Mitchell ‘hmmed’ from my side before making his way to his feet awkwardly; I waited for him to take my hand and help me up from my seated position, taking into consideration the combination of both of our clumsiness.

“I kind of want to stay, Andi, just to see what being in the middle of a storm is like,” I shook my head at the nonsense of his statement, simply tugging on his hand and walking forward a bit, concentrating on the ground in front of me. His weight stopped me dead in my tracks and I turned around slowly.

Through the swirling ink blots and hazy edges of my eyes, I could see him standing with his arms to his sides, face up and eyes closed, simply waiting for the storm to pelt him and knock him down where he stood.
Yet he looked so peaceful, so serene. His face reminded me of the days before the accident, when we were young and naïve, without a single care in the world, only worrying about getting the ice cream truck to stop before it left our street, and only knowing about the things that mattered the most: us being friends, and our parents always being there.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to see his face clearly, since I could read the emotions in his grey eyes, but for the first time in four years, I could read him plain as day. He was happy, and willing to let go of everything just to stand in the center of this one storm in the depths of an Ohio forest.

I closed my eyes as I took his hand and stood beside him, his hand squeezed mine gently in assurance, as he whispered the few words he had been repeating constantly.
“I always knew you could see, Andi.”
And then together we waited for the storm to come.