I remember sitting there, small enough that my feet didn’t even touch the ground, hearing everything. The music. The laughter. The gasps from the crowd.
It was loud and it was exciting, everyone around me locked into it, reacting, pointing, smiling, fully alive in the moment.
And none of it was clear to me. The performers blurred into the crowd, the details dissolving into shapes, movement, color bleeding into color.
Then I heard it. A motorcycle revving, loud and aggressive, getting faster. I could make out the outline of something, like a cage, a sphere. And inside it, something was moving.
The crowd built with it, cheering louder, reacting bigger, rising with whatever was happening inside. I leaned forward, squinting, trying to lock in. Trying to catch up.
I could see flashes of motion. Something circling. Maybe upside down. But I couldn’t follow it. Not really.
I watched everyone else instead. They reacted in real time, laughing when something hit, gasping when it got intense, and I tried to borrow their reactions since I couldn’t trust my own.
Something felt off, but I didn’t have the words for it yet. I just kept wondering what everyone else was seeing that I wasn’t.
I wasn’t blind. I could see, just not the way they could. Everything stayed soft at the edges. A blur.
I didn’t find out until later that I couldn’t actually see properly. That I needed glasses. That everyone else had been experiencing the world in a completely different way the entire time.
Looking back now, that moment hits differently. It wasn’t only about eyesight. I was there, but not fully connected. Close, but somehow always half a beat off.
That feeling followed me into other rooms, other moments, other stages of my life.
Most people don’t question what they’re looking at. They just assume it’s accurate and move on. I never got that luxury. I’d already learned the hard way that what I saw wasn’t always what was actually there.
The Blur turned out to be the start of something, not just a gap I had to close. Once things came into focus, I couldn’t take what was in front of me at face value anymore. I had to question it.
That habit started right there, in that crowd, years before I had a name for it. Before the glasses. Before I could see any of it clearly.
The story keeps going.
Chapter Two, The First Transaction, is next. New chapters drop on a rolling release.
Read Chapter Two →