I walked through the forest. The sockets where my eyes had been were cold and empty. They felt sore to touch but the blood around the rims had now dried and crusted. I didn’t know how long I needed to walk before I got to the lake. I didn’t even know if I was going in the right direction because I couldn’t see, but there was nowhere to go but forward.

One night I sat down and felt lonely for the first time. My thoughts must have been heard because the next morning I found a rose that had grown inside my left eye socket.

I stood up again to walk. By now the snow was melting and I could hear sounds of spring in the distance. I knew this was all because of the rose. Every sensation became imbued with a hue of its own. The scent of flowers. The flutter of butterflies. The warmth of air. As its petals rustled, a world with colour slowly rose out of a haze.

That night, I fell asleep feeling the emptiness of where my right eye had been. I dreamed of having another rose to fill up the space. When the sun came around in the morning, my world was set ablaze in kaleidoscopic light.

Reality had become a dream filled with the scent of summer. I was in a jungle and I could feel life in every corner. My head was dizzy with excitement. What I could only dream of seeing had materialised into things I could reach out and feel. My footsteps became faster and faster. I was half afraid that this world would end and half hoping that I could extinguish those fears by drawing myself more deeply into its maze.

I started to feel blisters on my feet and I could feel my breath struggling as I stumbled through the long blades of grass. My head was getting heavier. I realised that now all types of flowers imaginable, not just roses, were growing in full abundance from my eye sockets, with each petal adding more weight to my step. I could also hear the sound of water lapping against rocks. The lake was now in sight.

But then I fell, when I was one arm’s length away.

I couldn’t move any further. I tried to move again and again, but it seemed as though I was moving against gravity. Moving against a relentless, imaginary force.

I might have caught a reflection of myself in the water, maybe for a second. Then the water trickled down from the banks. It receded into a small pool in the middle, and then shrunk into nothing. The dry banks scorched red under the sunlight. 

I was so exhausted. Mirage, dream, hallucination. They all mean slightly the same but also completely different. I wasn’t sure which one it was. In the distance, dark clouds had gathered.

I woke up in the night and found that I could barely lift my head. It seemed as though a million hands were pressing down on me. I blinked, and I could see everything and nothing at the same time: the light and shadow of every being and object in the world had converged into a shade of pure beige, the colour of latte that my mother used to order at restaurants when I was a child, and I had thought the world of her for being able to order something so grown-up.

I reached up to my head to feel mounds and mounds of flowers that had bloomed into a towering column, which rose above me and into the sky. In desperation I began to break off some of its branches, but they kept growing and growing ceaselessly. I could feel blood running down my hands as the thorns cut my skin. The sound of thunder rang in my ears and down my shoulders and spine. I couldn’t tell whether it was my blood or the rain that had started to form puddles around me.

I kept trying to rip the flowers out but realised they had grown deeply from within my skull. As I lay there on the ground trying to catch my breath, I could see that every small movement of the flowers tugged at my chest, their roots pulsing with every beat of my heart. 

I found myself motionless on the ground, numb with cold. I was wearing hospital scrubs which were soggy from the rain. And then I felt electricity burn through my veins, before seeing strips of lightning that flashed across the sky.

I don’t remember how I lost my eyes, whether it was my choosing or someone else’s. In the beginning I thought it was my mother’s, who wanted me to have more beautiful eyes like hers. I imagine her taking me to a shop run by a kind-looking old lady, where there are rows and rows of flowers suspended in jars on shelves. There’s a catalogue detailing all the prices. I point to the one with a rose and my mum agrees to buy them for me even though they are expensive. She tells me it's because she loves me. I sit on a chair as though I am at the dentist’s, and the old lady rips my eyes out with cold metal. The moment her scalpel digs in I know I have made a mistake, but it’s too late. My mother looks at me with a concerned face and holds my hand and tells me that I can endure anything, and that everything will always turn out fine. And of course I was strong enough to endure it. If I wasn’t strong enough, then what type of mother would that make her? 

But I don’t know if this is really how I lost my eyes. I don’t know if I imagined all of that and I don’t know what exactly happened. I just know that I’ve lost my eyes. Can you help me think of why…

The next morning the sky is clear, and I am sitting in a flooded ditch. The body of water collected from the rainstorm has turned a deep blue. Dead roses float about, some with their petals charred and others still singeing with trails of smoke.