originally posted on karmapolice, Jan 2007

Yesterday night I had a phone call from Mirko, from whom I didn’t hear anything for quite a long time. He told me about some kind of new invention, how one can be healed from being shortsighted. As I still did not succeed in putting contact lenses in (but at least I have new glasses since december) I naturally was very interested.

He told me that the trick is, that you have to wear one lense on the eye, like normal contact lenses, and one behind, that is to say inside the eye for half a year, until the healing process is finished and one will see with 100 % sharpness again. Though this seemed somehow strange to me, I pulled my right eye out of its hole, in order to prepare it in the suggested way.

I only was quite irritated as I looked at my eye on the surface of my hand and it was open like a bowl of water, like if somebody had cut away the top, like one does with boiled eggs, so that the gallert-corpus-mass was swipping over the border a bit. I had to hold it very carefully to prevent it from leaking. So I asked Mirko on the phone »Mirko, I have my eye now in my hand, but it is open on the top. I can’t get it back into the eye-hole this way, as you can see the gallert mass will leak out of the eye as soon as I rotate it to bring it back in position. Please tell me what to do now?«

Unfortunately the contact broke exactly in that moment, as the batteries of my cell phone went down. I reached for the advice to charge the batteries with my one hand, the other holding my right eye. The time I finished with this I phoned back to Mirko, but he was not available.

The next thing I know is, that I see myself sitting in the tramway, having the phone ready, waiting for a call from Mirko. In the meantime I stitched the hole of my eye, so that I could transport it quite comfortable, without loss of gallert mass. It was swinging on the end of the thread I used for closing the hole. While sitting in the tramway and waiting for Mirko for helping me out of the trouble he brought me in with his nevertheless helpful suggestion, I got a little bit worried.

I thought that through my efforts to repair my eye, the geometry of it was perhaps disturbed in such a way, that incoming rays of light will not hit the retina any more, but will end off target, and I am not going to see anything or not that clearly anymore. Perhaps I will have my glasses to be changed then, and they are just quite new, so this would really be a pity. I had to check on that immediately. I raised the eye on the thread and hold it against the sun, so I could see right through the pupil to the back of my eye. It had a nearly transparent feature and it was very nice looking at it, the sun shining through it with sparkling red light. Indeed I did a very good job in closing the hole and also feeling quite proud, that I could handle this eye-affair quite naturally, me that was all the time not able to put simple contact lenses in, being such a mimosa. Watching through the pupil I had an exact view on my retina, and the blind spot was in the right place too. It was an exceedingly relieving and satisfying feeling.

My phone rang. Mirko. It have been time.

I quickly updated him to the new situation. Told him about stitching the hole and being in the tram and so on. And I began to wonder, how the second lense, that should be inside the eye should be put in place. »Well«, said Mirko, »I could not believe it in the first, too. But you see, eyes are of a kind of semi-permeable material. So you can simply push the lense right through the outer skin of the eye into the gallert corpse, without hurting the fibers or similar. It is a question of being concentrated.«

But I did not came to test this terrific scientific news — I was not aware of this semi-permeability of eyes up to now, they always appeared absolutely solid to me — as my attention was turned to a new problem. In order to protect the eye — a very sensible part of the human body after all, I had slipped it into a small yellow plastic shopping bag in the mean time. Having a look in the bag I noticed that the plastic picked in a way it should not on the surface of my eye. Trying to remove it, the surface of the eye showed an elastic character, the part that was sticking to the bag growing longer and longer. I was quite in horror. »Mirko, Mirko, the eye sticks to the plastic back, and I can’t remove it without damage, what shall I do? It will look very ugly and out of shape, when I proceed this way.«

But again I was diverted as the tram reached my station and I had to go out. It was really not my day, as I had problems in putting my three jackets and my 5 scarfs together, you see, with one hand always holding the eye in the plastic bag. Every time I reached for one item I lost another, and my things were mixed with the clothes from other people in the tram, too. Why did I had so many jackets and scarfs with me at all? Don’t ask me.

Of course I missed the station that way. I got seated again, and began freeing the eye from the plastic bag. The result was a wee bit disappointing, but I stayed calm.

As you may understand I felt very free and happy, when the next thing I noticed was, that I was heading with Patrick to a kind of fair in my old school in Regensburg, where I was meeting lots of old friends, and having both my eyes in my head. So finally I must have succeeded in putting my right eye back into the hole somehow. Inside there was a small coffee shop, and I bought a huge café mocca with a scoop of pistachio ice cream in it. Thinking it over, that sounds really fine — I have to taste it some time or other.