lazy_eye raze i used to have a blog. i still do, but i haven't written a word there since last july. it feels like something that's over. maybe because it's attached to a part of me that isn't there anymore. a thing that's gone, for however long it decides it wants to be. i guess you could call it dormant. and i guess you could say i was surprised when i got an email telling me someone signed up to follow the movements of my sleeping blog. i almost choked on all the air in my throat when i saw the name of the woman who was my provisional stepsister for a few years when i was young enough to wash my hair in the bathtub without taking off my clothes. only a few whispered words in a church kept it from being official. she was almost ten years older than me. she had a boyfriend. knowing that and knowing what she could have been didn't stop me from dreaming about her. i wanted to be the face that magnetized her lazy left eye. i wanted to kiss every pore and freckle on her nose. i wanted to breathe in the smell of her cigarettes until i forgot what oxygen was. i haven't seen her in more than twenty years. she's married. she has a son and a daughter. her last name would be different now. the profile page that belongs to the person who subscribed to the email list for a website that hasn't been updated in eleven months showed me a picture of a fifty-eight-year-old man who lives in northern california. it wasn't her. i didn't choke. still. so much can live inside a name, even when the person it's attached to isn't anyone you know. 220607 ... kerry i had one--my left. my mom didn't call it a lazy eye, she called it strabismus, which is the medical term for any kind (i think) of eye misalignment. she probably did this to give it some dignity. and it was always referred to in the past tense because it was corrected when i was about a year and a half. they did surgery and then i had to wear a patch on my right eye to strengthen the left one. the lazy one. both eyes were still blue, then. they hadn't turned green yet. i asked my parents how they did surgery for strabismus and they gave me a very rudimentary explanation. "they put you under, which was terrifying for me," said my mom, "and they pulled your eye up out of the socket and tightened the muscle that connects your eye to your brain and then they popped it back in." i haven't bothered to look up surgery for strabismus because i prefer this sensationalized and almost-certainly inaccurate version. despite the surgery, sometimes i'll see a candid photo of myself where i'm daydreaming, or just looking at nothing, and the left eye is ever-so-slightly drifting outward. our computer teacher in elementary school had two lazy eyes and she was terrifying. she wore these dresses with puffed sleeves and enormous white collars that were like bibs. (a lot of the teachers wore dresses like this because it was the nineties and teachers were required to wear ugly clothing.) in my memory she also wore an apron though this is probably just embellishment. her hair was frizzy and she was always cranky and you never knew where she was looking or who she was yelling at. it's my dad's fault, the strabismus, but his is very mild. when he's spaced out or tired one eye tiptoes slightly outward. i asked him once if he could make it go out and he said "fine" and one eye--i think also the left--went splaying outwards and i screamed and he laughed, and then he said it gave him a headache and he's refused to do it ever since. 220607 what's it to you? who go blather from