I love contacts, and then I hate them. I love them because I don’t have to wear glasses, and I hate them because they are far from being perfected. Every morning when I tried to put them in, I would be anxious the rest of the day that they’d slide around and cause me discomfort. Sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn’t.

Then, I’d forget to take them out at the end of long nights, and I’d wake up with a headache so bad, I Had to walk around with a blanket over my head to keep the light out.

Two summers ago, my optometrist told me there was a kind of contact that you can sleep in, for over a month. I gave it a test run and was delighted to find that overnight, the contact would somehow become glued to my eyeball and eliminate any kind of movement that caused discomfort. These contacts were seemingly magical.

Then, a few months ago, whatever substance made the contact stick to my eyeball, overproduced and my contacts began to blur. Whenever my eyes watered, they cleared for a few minutes and my vision was restored. Luckily but oddly, only one eye would blur at a time, and my eyes took turns, as if they were a tag-team.

Because I was too lazy to get myself into see my optometrist, I walked around partially blind, trying to yawn all the time, or would “inadvertently” poke myself in the eye. The humidity helped to some extent, so I welcomed all kinds of rainstorms and fog.

Finally, three months later, I went in and explained my situation. My optometrist flipped up my eyelids for the first time while I sat writhing in her chair with irritation.

Later that day, back on campus, I could see, but my left contact was bothering my left eye so much that every ten minutes I had to make a routine trip to the library restroom to take it out and pop it back on my eye. During one of these trips, I walked into the restroom and heard someone using the facilities. Then I heard her speaking on the phone. Ew! I thought. That’s just wrong. Does the person on the other end of the phone know she’s peeing and talking to her at the same time? Can the person hear what’s going on on my end? I shuddered and then took out my contact and held it up to the light. It appeared to be misshapen.

The bathroom talker emerged from her stall and stared at me analyzing my contact by the light. I prayed she would just wash her hands and leave. Mostly I prayed that she would just wash her hands, so I could feel somehow cleaner.

“Your contact giving you trouble?”

“Yep. I think it’s just misshapen.”

“Some people think it’s gross, but when mine is bothering me, I stick it in my mouth to make it wet again.”

I stopped looking at my contact and turned to look at her. There was no sign of her kidding.

How strange. Appearances can be so deceiving; she looked fairly normal.
For lack of anything better to say, I turned back to my contact and said the first thing I could think of, “I wonder how it would taste.”

I waited for her to wash her hands and leave. My contact had been bothering me all day and nothing was helping.

I looked at my contact. It looked at me. I put it in my mouth.

I tried not to think about the prospect of my eye juice being on it, and instead told myself I was eating some exotic and slippery sea-creature. I shuddered, took the specimen out quickly, and stuck it in my eye.

It seemed to help a little bit.

I sent my friend a text message: someone told me to put my contact in my mouth because it was bothering me.

She replied: Ew! That’s insane!

I was glad I’d sent that message. I’d felt as though I’d never done it.

One hour later, my eye began to throb. I ran back to the bathroom again, and after checking to make sure all the stalls were empty, I performed the trick a second time.

I swallowed it. I tried to cough it up, but obviously failed. All the things I’d ever swallowed came flooding back to me: rings, paperclips, gum, pennies, and meatloaf. Most of these were as a child, though.

I walked around, nearly blind in my left eye. Upon exiting the bathroom, I ran into the doorframe. That was my last contact.

I made an appointment with my optometrist again. Somehow I drove myself to her office without running into or over anyone.

Grabbing for the door handle, I found it about two inches to the right of where I’d been groping for it. I opened the left door and ran into the doorframe of the door that had a sign saying “Please Use Other Door”.

“Hi there! You must be Tasha,” the receptionist greeted me. I’d never seen her before.

“Wow, good guess,” I told her.

“Not really.” She pointed at my parking job. I closed my left eye and saw that I parked in the middle of two spaces.

My optometrist took me into the back room and asked what happened to the contact I’d swallowed.

“I threw it away,” I told her.

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