Cyclops

Dark love story

I met her forever ago, and even now she’s more than just a memory. If you’re looking for a romantic love story, this isn’t really the one. This is a love story, for sure, but not one of mutual love.
We met in a park, she was sitting on a bench. She had a bright red coat on, and the accumulation of snowflakes on her lap and shoulders meant she hadn’t moved for a while. She wore grand, round, dark sunglasses, and a white hat. She wore long dress up pants under her coat, covering the shoes she was wearing.
                I’m not one to talk to people, you know? But I sat next to her anyway, and when I said ‘hi,’ she jumped, almost as if she hadn’t known I was there. I continued engaging in conversation, talking about the weather, asking why she was sat here alone. I quickly realized that she in fact could not see, later to find out that she had been born blind, she had never been able to see. She told me she was waiting for someone, that they hadn’t shown up, and she was figuring out how to get back home.
                I didn’t know this person, but I offered her a ride. I stood up, and watched her pull up her pants to adjust her prosthetic, which had gotten slightly stiff from the cold. I helped her up, and walked her to my car. We laughed the whole way, and when I dropped her off at her front door, she thanked me with a hug, before her caretaker quickly took her inside.
                I saw her every day after that day. Every day I showed up at her house, talking from dawn till dusk, slowly but deeply falling in love with every aspect of this mysterious woman’s being.
So we ended up getting engaged, and, you all might think I’m weird, but my gift to her after we got married, instead of a honey moon, was the gift of sight. I gave her my eyeball.
                She saw what I looked like for the first time the day before she said “I do.”
The wedding was in the winter, commemorating the season we had met. We weren’t engaged long, but with one eye each and three functioning legs between the two of us, we had a happy five-year marriage.   On our tenth year anniversary, because her prosthetic had degraded to the point of where a wheelchair was introduced, I decided once again that as one (because they say you become one when you are deeply in love), we would get through anything together. I was assured before the second surgery that because my legs had always been intact, a prosthetic would be more than functional for me, whereas it was no longer an option for her. So I gave her my leg.
The surgery had complications, and while they were able to reattach my leg to hers, I was left legless, with no potential for a prosthetic myself. Now I was the one stuck in a wheel chair.

And this is when it gets sad, because I loved her, I loved her so much, even as she whispered her last words to me, I still love her:

“Sorry, Cyclops, but you’re not the person that I had met, you can’t see, you can’t walk, and now I just can’t be with you any longer.”

Author's Note

*note that the narrator's gender was never identified

Reviews

[Story Time]

It's almost like you drew the inspiration for this from a novel or a real-life love story. The darkness of one person; their problems, ailments, afflictions, etc. can spread to another, and, before they know it, overtake them. A bright red coat...a soft red blanket beside a small pond, geese aloof.

[Delmar Cooper]

I once saw a retrospective of Lon Chaney movies. Lon Senior not Junior. Junior was the flabby guy that played the wolf-man in about a dozen movies. Chaney's movies scared the whey out of me, bitter ironies and surprising tragic twists, good deeds repaid with despair, bad deeds repaid with ghastly certainty. Your story reminded me of that.