《She skimmed her fingers over the wooden desk. They fell lightly onto the grafts and patterns that her mother had carefully chiseled out for her after years and years of her struggling to learn Braille》

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At 7 years old, she'd started Kindergarten, delayed first by her frantic mother, then by a particularly long-lasting case of scarlet fever that struck her the day that school started.

(her mother had decided to keep her home that year as well, using the temporary illness as an excuse)

And when she had entered Kindergarten, and they did the hearing tests for the whole grade, she'd had the best score in her class. She had come home that day with a yellow sheet of paper in her hand, and a jubilant expression. But on the back of the sheet were scary words. They said that, "vision tests were recommended due to exceptional results on the first screening".

So she came back to school the next day, a signed slip in her hand, a wavering smile on her face, and a squint as she gazed at the blurry school sign.

A different doctor had handled that test, placing white spoons in front of her eyes and asking her to, "tell him which picture was on the glowing screen in front of her". She walked out of the converted-teachers-lounge with a hopeful expression, wanting, oh-so-badly, to have done as well on that test as she had done on the previous one.

But even then, with a seven-year-old brain, she couldn't help but feel as though something had gone wrong.

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The next months had been filled with spindly black ants dancing on white screens and pages, and numbers shouted out to the various doctors that crowded around her. They all proclaimed that, "they had never seen such a young child with such a dangerously severe prescription."

One day, she had sucked on a cherry-flavoured lollipop, sticky, red goo staining her little hands, and asked one of the doctors if she was blind. It was a word that she'd heard muttered in the hallways of the institution that she was staying at, and she wondered if it had anything to do with her.

The doctor had tapped the bridge of his glasses up his nose a centimeter or two, and gazed at her, "Oh honey," he had said. "You're beyond blind". Then he had twisted open the jar of lollipops that resided on his desk, and handed her two more, one blue and one yellow.

She remembered trying to figure out what that meant, but no one would give her a straight answer. After that, the doctors were careful to no longer say the numbers that came up on the tests that she was given around her anymore. They scurried around corners instead, waving papers in their supervisors faces, wanting to expose the latest bit of apparent data.

And every week, like clockwork, she was handed a new pair of glasses- always the same frames, but thicker lenses each time.

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Eight was the age that everything had changed for real. It was the age that she had taken her mother's flip phone from her room, and squinted as she had selected the messages. All afternoon long, she had listened to the recordings, the doctor's rough voices reading aloud new reports each time. Eventually, she had happened upon an actual diagnosis; Advanced Gradual Myopia.

The phone had all her gradual prescriptions stored in a recorded message in order, starting at her first eye test; the kindergarten screening. The numbers had been put down as -18.9 in her right eye, and -20.1 in her left eye. But it had been put down as a system error, because such severity was not common in such young children.

They grew worse, though the message only listed the significant changes, though the numbers grew worse monthly, going down by full points in a matter of weeks, or sometimes, even days.

As she listened to her unknown past laid out by a cellular device, she realised that she hadn't been handed new glasses for the last month, and somewhere along the course of the last few weeks, her old glasses had disappeared. She'd never really noticed, because there was always so much going on, that a simple pair of glasses wasn't particularly important to her.

At the end of the message, an automated voice sounded briefly. "Stated patient will be discharged as a temporary outpatient on 2/3/13".

She didn't fully understand the message that she'd just listened to, but she knew that her time at the hospital was short-lived, because, according to her doom-full fate stated on her mother's phone, she was being removed from the only place that she had known for the last two years.

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Her mother found her, hours later, perched delicately on the beanbag chair placed in the corner of her room. Her head had lolled to the side, and at some point, the eight-year-old girl had stuck her thumb into her mouth. There were tear-tracks staining her cheeks, but around her clenched fist, the corners of her mouth curved upwards.

They packed up their stuff together, and moved into a two-room apartment on the bad side of town. There were two beds in their bedroom, but she always found herself moving shaky feet along the carpet until one of them bumped into her mother's bed.

At this point, she was blind. Not legally blind, or partially blind, but shadows-were-the-only-things-that-she-could-see blind. Her mother tried to send her back to school, but the girl never learned a thing as she stumbled around, not being able to see the world.

So her mother home-schooled her, buying CD's and educational tapes in bulk. But as hard as they tried, she could not learn Braille.

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In all the hectic happenings of living at home with her mother and trying to be home-schooled, she began to sketch, sometimes stumbling outside of her apartment to try to sweep the differentiating lights and shadows onto a piece of paper.

People walked past frequently, sometimes stopping to ask what she was doing, and sometimes breathing down her back so that they could get a closer look. She became known as the "the Sketcher Girl". Boys would catcall her, sometimes jumping up and down on the street to try to catch her attention.

Not one of them knew. That she was blind. And broken inside.

Because if they did, they wouldn't care anymore, or try to get the attention of the / girl / that / sat / by / the / curb.

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Even though she couldn't wrap her mind around even the simplest parts of Braille, her skills with a pencil became useful when she wanted to write a message for others. She couldn't see what things looked like anymore, but in the fragile memories of her younger years, there were plenty of things that she could adapt.

In a desperate attempt to help her daughter, her mother had scratched out, and carefully glued on various letters of the alphabet, and some phrases that appealed to her on a wooden desk that stood on the far side of the kitchen. But three years later, she only knew one word.

beautiful.

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She hadn't smiled in 2 years.

She'd stopped sketching.

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She sat at the curb

Every day.

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A boy walked

Over to her.

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She flinched.

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He said

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"Your eyes are beautiful."

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Then he walked away.

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She opened a new page in her sketchbook.

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And smiled.