When I was in the shower the other night, a drop of rinsed water from my body sponge spattered right into my right eye. I washed my eye in haste over and over so as not to get germs. It was one of those things that happen all the time in our daily life and I didn’t worry so much. I actually had forgotten about it by the time I went to sleep.

The next morning I stood in front of the bathroom sink with sleepy eyes as usual and saw my face in the mirror. In it, my right eye had a large smudge of blood in the white. My drowsy brain got electrified and I was instantly wide awake. It wasn’t simply bloodshot but a stain of blood spread in the half of the eye. It was ominous enough to frighten me badly. I remembered the water spatter in the shower, but it seemed too small to cause this big damage.

Is this a foretaste of some kind of a serious disease? Is a heart attack or something imminent? Am I going blind? Do I need to rush to the hospital that I hate so much and always keep away? Besieged by all kinds of sinister questions, I remembered I’ve often heard a bad reputation that the only hospital in my small town in the mountains has no good equipment nor good doctors. At the same time, I remembered a scene in some movie I once saw in which a man had the similar bloody smudge in his eye when he was about to die.

I sat at the table for breakfast across my partner with a mountainous amount of fear. As soon as he glanced at me, he stopped crunching cereal and turned pale. I asked him what was wrong and he answered that it was my eye. He looked into it for a moment then said that his eye sight became white out and couldn’t see anything. He started sweating heavily and claimed that sweat didn’t stop pouring out. He left for the bathroom in the middle of breakfast.

His reaction threw me deeper in terror. My eye with a smudge of blood must have been so horrible that he became sick. Since he’s a big fan of a TV drama ‘The Walking Dead’, he may have thought one of the zombies finally came to reality and appeared to him. The situation was reversed and he looked more ill than I was. About ten minutes later, thankfully, he felt better and resumed his cereal.

I was anxious all day long. I imagined I might fall flat at any moment. I might go unconscious or blind. Even if I kept surviving, I couldn’t go outside with this eye on my face especially because I foolishly care my appearance too much. With fear clawing hold of me, I spent the day moving slowly and quietly as if I was living in total darkness.

In the evening, my partner who had looked up my symptom on the Internet told me it was perfectly nothing wrong and would disappear by itself gradually in one to two weeks. That sent me the light from above with the angels’ choir. It was nothing! Suddenly I felt like I breathe again, and couldn’t feel any stupider. I wondered why I didn’t look up online by myself first thing in the morning. I had been dreadful all day and wasted the day just for nothing. As it turned out, all I needed was to wait for the smudge to disappear. I would pass the coming one to two weeks by donning this eye, avoiding acquaintances, trying to see as less residents as possible on the hallway of my apartment building, wearing sunglasses when eating out, and generally hiding away. While I was relieved and cheerful about that I wasn’t ill, another depressing feeling seized me as I thought about my life in hiding for the coming weeks…

Episode from

Country Living in Mountain of Japan by Hidemi Woods

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