Into the light
He’s in the other room now, back to work, typing words into a computer he cannot see. Yesterday we were on an airplane, and at times I described for him the look of fellow passengers — “There’s a lot of Patagonia.” A week earlier it was a road trip, and me trying to tell of what the sky was doing, or the farmlands and rivers, the rolling hills dotted with trees of changing leaves. “It’s a bit like we’re driving through Thanksgiving,” I remember at one point saying.
Seeing for someone, it’s more difficult than you might think.
“Hey man, you see my shoes?”
“Yeah, they’re right there.” A mistake. There, here — these words mean little to a blind man, but for the sighted they just spill out, a difficult thing to curb. “Sorry — I mean just a little to your right, about a foot, just next to the mat.” Better.
Four years on and still I catch myself forgetting: my friend sees nothing now. Not me or you, not his shoes or these words but only the black around them, or around the sounds we give him to make some other image.
And tonight? Tonight he’ll go on a date. With a woman he also won’t see except in his mind. Since I’m still around, I’ll help: where they’ll meet, we decided on this together, with me typing “date spots” into a search engine and then telling him about the reviews and photos that came up. His outfit, it’ll be picked by him, but probably double-checked by me, since I can still be “his eyes.” I’ll also drive him there and maybe back so he won’t have to call a taxi as he’d usually do, and we laugh about this, how tonight I’ll be playing the role of Mom in that scene from The Karate Kid when she ferries Daniel over to his date, “I’ll pick you up at 11. Please don’t be late. Have fun!”
“Yeah, it’s terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying,” he tells me, about coming back to dating. “I haven’t had to do this for years. I was married from 2005 to 2019 essentially, so it’s terrifying. And I guess I was like this when I was dating before but you always feel that you’re not good enough.”
It’s more terrifying because you’re now blind? Or terrifying irregardless?
“It would be terrifying irregardless but it’s more terrifying now because I have to compensate or take that into consideration. Like I remember when I started going into the dating apps and my buddies would say a lot of people want to be asked out right away, but it’s not that easy for me. Because I also have to make sure it’s OK with them that they’re going to have to be a sighted guide. So yeah, absolutely terrified. I like to be up front on my dating profile, letting them know that I am blind so hopefully that’s just, like, addressed right away and certain things are assumed. But yeah, it’s terrifying.
“If I can chalk it up: it’s a lack of control. When you’re dating anyone new, the desire is already there to control the narrative in a way. Be in charge of something: where we meet, what I look like, how I get there. And now I don’t have any of that. So it’s just another element to another thing I’m not in control of.”
Tonight, we’ll try to arrive early — his idea. This way I can help him choose a good table, then lay out a description of the place and his relation to the space. Then I’ll go. Maybe get a drink somewhere else and wait. And just maybe, smile.
Date night.
Hello, ladies.
~
Some facts now.
Jason Consolacion, my best friend since we met in college, went blind in 2019 due to complications related to diabetes — the leading cause of blindness. I wrote about this then, when we were still in the shock of it:
We’ve cried together. Yelled together. Cursed. There are steps to these kinds of things, they say — steps to grieving. They say acceptance comes, that it’s the last step, but I’m not so sure we’re there yet. When will we really know?
And now, four years on? In Oregon, where we made that recent trip to the coast so he could hear waves crashing rather than just a description of it, we read back the piece I wrote. Then I asked, So?
“It’s way different. I’m much more positive and I see a lot more possibility. When it first happened, it was a lot of emotion, obviously. But like, the first time I put a white cane in my hand, I got emotional.”
I remember this. I remember how in the beginning, Jason wanted no part of a white cane, the device visually impaired people use to tap at the ground as they walk. I remember how he preferred holding onto my or anyone’s elbow instead — and only that elbow, no cane.
Was that just about showing weakness?
“Yes, there was an element of that but the biggest effect (the cane) had on me was feeling defeated — succumbing to the vision loss.”
As if it made it real?
“Yeah. I think you were there that day when we were in the apartment still. We were about to go to the diner, and Amy put the cane in my hand, and I literally felt like less of a person.”
Now the cane goes with him everywhere, like a limb. And he’s not only fine with it, he often insists on it even when there’s a trusted elbow to hang onto. Still he’ll unfold it, tap at the ground.
“It’s my eyes,” he says. “And it’s a visual cue for others, too.” The latter part of the comment almost takes me aback: he wants the others to see him now. See his blindness. Something that sounds a bit like acceptance.
“Yeah, I’ve accepted it. I’m wanting to continue to learn every day how to live with it. But I actually don’t even think about it sometimes. When I’m doing my day-to-day, it doesn’t occur to me that I’m blind. And it’s not that I forget that I’m blind, it’s just that I don’t think of it.”
To get here — to this newly tapped ground, this new normal, Jason has needed time and he’s needed help. He’s needed friends to lean on. And therapy. He’s needed the mobility and Home-Ec classes offered by The Orientation and Training Center (OTC) in Washington, which taught him the tips and tricks of living more easily in the dark: lessons in using the cane, or setting up the objects of a life precisely, everything always left in the same place, in the same way, so he’ll remember where to feel for and find it. The spaces in which Jason lives — his room, his office, his bathroom and kitchen — are all pristine, because the blind can’t afford to be slobs; that time he needed to ask me about his shoes, this was only because we were in that Oregon hotel room which still he hadn’t become fully acquainted with, thus he was just that one foot off.
“I’m getting better,” he says of navigating new spaces. “Three years ago, I’d still have so much anxiety over it. Of course I’m still worried I’m going to hit my head into something, but you know, my teacher says it’s just going to happen.”
Between the bumps, Jason does his own laundry. And cooks — yes, he cooks. He can manage a stove or oven just fine, even sharp knives, these items still in his world and at his fingertips, all because of those classes. He cleans up after himself, too, putting dishes away and taking the garbage out — and all of this, he enjoys. He wants it. Because it’s a sense of independence still. A power over the darkness, even.
And for work? Still Jason works for his dream company, Apple. Only instead of working the floor at the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York as he used to, now he sells the same products from home, answering calls fed into him from a switchboard. And here is a sight to behold: Jason at his desk, headset on, the computer in front of him, his fingers typing furiously. All this, made possible by the company he works for, because iPhones and iMacs now come with an accessibility mode for bad eyes. This means that in Jason’s headset, as he’s talking to a customer, a screen reader is also privately dictating back to him where his cursor is, and what he’s typing, in a kind of rapid-fire duet that actually comes together so seamlessly and so fast that anyone on the other end of the line would have no idea they’re placing an order with a blind man.
“There’s no other situation I’d be able to do this in,” Jason says. “Every Apple product has built-in accessibility, and it’s way more advanced, more accessible now. They don’t just have it for blind people — they have (modes) for deaf people, people with mobility issues, cognitive issues, and all of it is built in. So I was already working for Apple because I was a big fan boy and I loved working for the company, but for what happened to me, this was like the most ideal situation. It’s probably the smoothest transition regarding this whole thing that could have happened.”
At work.
At the gym.
~
What does he miss seeing the most?
Women, he says with a smile.
What’s the hardest part about being blind?
The lack of visual cues — a grin, a roll of the eyes, a yawn. “Body language is a very big part of communication,” he realizes now more than ever.
And the best part of being blind?
“The handicap parking,” he quips. Then he thinks for a bit. Says, “Something they always say in blind school is that you never fully figure it out. You’re always learning. And I think that’s true in life, but as a blind person and especially someone that became disabled after being fully-abled before — I think that, like, I’m more in tune with it. I’m always mindful in being hyper focused on learning new ways to do things. I’m kind of re-learning how to live, but in a way that’s safe for me. And in a way that’s essentially safe for others too. But just so I can regain my independence.”
Independence. It’s the word he says often. A word he fights and strives for. Presently Jason lives in his own wing, with his own private entrance and office and kitchen, within his parents’ beautiful home just north of Seattle, with a view of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains he also can’t see. This move home happened after both his vision and his marriage dissolved back in New York, and the pandemic hit. But now he wants to move out again, maybe even back to his beloved New York. He longs for a life as close to his old one as he can manage, or at least an even more independent one than what he leads now. He wants to remarry. And have children. Simply, he wants all of the things any man might see for himself as a full existence.
The plane ride we just took — it was a return flight back to Seattle from Florida, where for the first time in years we visited our other best friend from college, Keenan Singleton, who now has exactly what Jason is after: his own beautiful, happy family. A magnificent wife and kids running around and playing — and Jason sending the little boy into fits of laughter with a bit where he picks up the boy’s foot and pretends he thinks it’s a phone. Now more than ever, Jason is convinced this dream of family is possible for him too.
Already once since his world went dark, Jason found himself in a serious relationship. It fizzled, but it was key. “For me, getting together with Megan was like a huge thing. Because I was motivated to be with someone, to show up for someone, and not just to meet someone to be my caretaker. That’s not what I want. I want to be as equal of a partner as possible. That’s never going to be possible for me if I’m involved with someone that’s fully abled, but that’s what I want to put out there.”
And so, he keeps taking the necessary steps, with and without his cane. And feeling for the walls around him. And pushing.
He does this all while still singing, still playing his guitar and making records — music his biggest passion and ever more important now. He still watches his favorite TV shows and goes to the cinema, only now with “audio description” turned on either on the TV or within the special headphones most cinemas now offer. He still exercises in the mornings or on his lunch breaks. And he still reads — in braille, but more often via his screen reader, which, once I hit the button that reads Publish, will take even these words and lift them up and out of the dark for him. And out of this dark eventually he’ll get here, to the last words, which will be these:
If only you could see yourself, man. Because to see it is to see light. To be inspired.
Three best friends, and the dream.
(And a little post-script for those curious: the date went well.)
