Blind Assertion
Written by Minwoo Choi
Illustrated by Nahyun Song
July 23rd 4:01 PM
The soft tinkering sound lands on the air and everything falls into silence. The obvious
tension reaches out from all directions as it would do in a parent’s clumsy surprise party for their kid.
Great. Letting my gaze fall onto the menu, or at least trying to look as if they have, I try to picture the
scene in my mind. My friends all dressed up in waiters’ outfits, looking ridiculous in those penguin
suits, glancing at each other anxiously, and trying awkwardly not to look at the doorway the whole
time. Not to look at her. I hear the bells brushing against each other again with a jingle. She’s inside.
And the image in my mind; all those tables, chairs, and everything I can remember from what café is,
begins to hold a huge blank space that I tried so hard to fill in but have failed thousand times. I could
never, and would never be able to imagine her. Just as I would never be able to see her.
July 2nd 8:38 AM
“You are not going tell her that you are blind?” Hands tighten their grasps around my shoulders and I try to shrug them off. Not letting me go or even loosening the grip, Al makes me sit down
on the chair, his hot breath making me frown. “And then you ask her out for a date?” I don’t want to
answer. Shoving away his words, I focus on portraying how Al’s face would look like at this instant.
The only pieces of memories of Al that I can collect are the images of a timid brunette boy with a
chubby chin. It’s been more than 7 years that the images in my head have failed to match the voice or
the gesture of this guy who claims himself to be the same person. It’s been the same with everything.
The more I try to cling to the memories of the sighted world, the more the familiar things fade away
abandoning me with the mismatching and useless fragments of the past. Sometimes I am no longer
sure whether a world really exists beyond the interminable blackness, imagining the malicious phantoms instead; the phantoms trying to fool me that something is still out there when all has actually
collapsed along with my sight. It once was a frightening nightmare but now……. at least the thought
of everything being just an illusion comforts me. It is less cruel, far less cruel than to realize everyone else can still ‘see’ things, enjoying every color, every shade, every glitter, things that can never
belong to me again. It is less cruel than to realize that all sympathies for my blindness are not the
ghostly whispers but the piercing reality. “Just tell her. She’ll understand.” Al’s voice softens, turning
into a croon and another image of a chubby 11 years-old boy crouching next to a dumb, limping pi28