The glasses I lost the night everything came into focus

It was a Wednesday in late August, the kind of Melbourne evening that smells like rain and trams and someone's cigarette drifting out of a pub doorway. I had my reading glasses tucked into the front of my shirt the way I always do, perched somewhere between the second and third button of a thrifted blazer. By midnight they were gone. By sunrise I understood why.

The pub was a small one in Fitzroy, the sort with sticky floors and a jukebox that only seemed to play Crowded House and Amy Winehouse. I was halfway through my second glass of something red and cheap when a woman I barely knew leaned across the table and said something that knocked the breath out of me. I reached for my glasses the way you do when you want to look away, and they were not there. The whole bar blurred into something softer, kinder, impossible to read.

It turns out that losing a pair of glasses is a very specific kind of heartbreak. You reach for them before you remember they are gone, and then you have to keep going anyway. You squint at the world and realise you have been squinting at it for years.

The pub on Brunswick Street

Brunswick Street does something strange to the light. It bends it around graffiti murals and beer signs until everything looks like a film still from the nineties. The pub had a name I cannot remember, something with "Hotel" at the end of it, and a long wooden bar that had survived more than a century of arguments.

I had been going there for months with a group of writers who met on Thursdays, but this was a different night, a sort of goodbye drinks that had stretched well past last orders. Someone ordered a round of schooners. Someone else started a tab and then forgot to mention the limit. By the time the conversation that ruined me began, I had already forgotten the names of half the people at the table, which is saying something because I am terrible with names at the best of times.

The conversation that blurred my vision

She said something like, "You write about other people because you do not know how to write about yourself." I laughed, the way you laugh when someone has aimed too close. Then I told her she was wrong. Then I stopped talking altogether and felt the room tilt.

Without my glasses I could only see her as a shape, a silhouette against the yellow light of a streetlamp that had flickered on somewhere outside the window. She looked softer. I looked softer. Everyone looked like they were about to say the truest thing they had ever said. I remember thinking that if I squinted any harder I would disappear entirely, and for a moment I did. I vanished into the blur of that small, smoke-stained room and let someone else do the talking.

What I saw without them

There is a peculiar honesty in not being able to see clearly. You stop checking the exits, the time, the reflection of yourself in the back of someone's phone. You start listening to the cadence of a sentence instead of the way a mouth moves when it forms the words. I heard things I had been too busy editing to notice.

Someone at the bar was crying quietly into a schooner. Someone else was explaining, very slowly, the rules of AFL to a tourist who kept nodding in the wrong places. A tram rattled past on the street outside and the conductor dinged the bell twice, the way they do at the corner of Johnston Street. I had lived in this neighbourhood long enough to recognise the sound of a tram stopping even when I was not looking, and that small, automatic knowledge made me feel both old and strangely held.

Writing it down the next morning

I woke up on the floor of a friend's place in Collingwood with a headache and a half-written note on my phone. The note began with the word "glasses" and ended with the word "clear." In between was a mess of phrases that only made sense to me. I drank a flat white from the cafe downstairs and sat in a patch of weak Melbourne sun, trying to remember what she had actually said.

I went looking for a piece about how to write when you have lost something. I found one tucked away on how to write, and the timing was so precise it felt like the universe was having a joke at my expense. I read it twice. I underlined half of it. Then I sat down and started writing the version you are reading now, before the blur could wear off.

Finding them, or not

I never found those glasses. They are probably still on the sticky floor of that pub, or in the gutter of Brunswick Street, or in the pocket of someone else's blazer. A few weeks later I bought a new pair from the optometrist on Smith Street, and the world came back into focus in a way that felt almost rude. Colours sharpened. Edges hardened. The kindness of blur was gone.

But I kept the note from that morning, and I kept the conversation, and I kept the strange, dizzying sense that something had finally been said out loud. That is how I came to write who I am and what I do now, because the night I lost my glasses was the night I stopped pretending I could see. I have been writing in that raw, slightly squinting way ever since, and I have not lost a pair of frames since. I have, however, lost a few more illusions, which feels like the fair trade.

If something in this piece made you reach for your own glasses, or wish you had lost them sooner, you can send me your story through the submissions page on the site. I read every one. I answer most. And if you want to know more about the woman behind the blazer and the broken pair of frames, you can find the rest of her scribbling away in a flat above a laundromat in inner-city Melbourne, halfway through her third flat white of the afternoon.