Look at these glasses. These stupid, square, red glasses. I wore them for six years. Now I have nightmares about them.

I remember going to the optometrist and being set down in that strange large chair and having the cold plastic instrument to measure my eye sight being pulled in front of my face.  I wasn't afraid. I thought of this as some kind of fun new game to test my eyes. I had no idea anything could come from this. I was nine years old at the time.

When I heard that I got to wear glasses, I was thrilled. It was like a new piece of jewelry for me to wear. I was led into a room lined with rows of eyeglasses along the walls. There were so many choices! I could choose any one of them I wanted. I looked and found some prescription sunglasses. Maybe wearing sunglasses would make me look cool. Even at that young age, though, it seemed impractical to have to wear them when it was dark or while indoors. So I passed them by. I then considered some plastic blue ones but thought they looked cheap and tacky. My eye was caught by a pair of shiny red, metal framed glasses. The arms were painted gold, and on the inside of the right arm was painted the word "Disney" in black cursive letters. I remember noticing that immediately. These seemed so much sharper- looking than the plastic glasses. I tried them on and scrutinized myself in the mirror. How exciting it was to look different!

I went to school the next day bubbling with anticipation to show my friends my new look. I waited for them to make a comment about the glasses but no one did. They were being polite because they didn't like them. I didn't know that then, of course. So I pointed the glasses out to them. "Look at the new glasses I got!" I exclaimed enthusiastically. My friends disappointed me by nonchalantly nodding and mumbling "oh yeah..." Later, the glasses really did become a part of me.

I don't remember not being able to see well before I got my glasses. I only remember that afterwards I couldn't stand to look at anything without them on. I can't help thinking sometimes that these cursed red glasses, my saviour, caused my further need for them as I got older. I call them my saviour because at the time, I loved them.

My sister, on the other hand, who got glasses soon after I did, despised them. She hated the way people treated her because of her glasses. She only wore them when she had to. She would rather be blind than be seen in them. I hadn't been old enough at the time I got my glasses to realize that they were the reason anyone treated me any differently. At first, I don't even remember being treated differently. Not until fifth grade did I really begin to notice. People avoiding me because of the glasses, almost as they might do to a person in a wheelchair. It got worse as I got older, but I don't think that I noticed. One boy called me four-eyes in fifth grade, but I didn't care. I didn't care partly because it was the last day of school and nothing could have ruined my good mood, partly because he was a nerd anyway, but mostly because I loved my glasses. I believed they were the best things that ever happened to me and no one could have convinced me otherwise.

Though I knew that my glasses impaired my looks, I felt my need for them to be greater than any whim to vanity. I opted once, for a school picture, to remove my glasses. I did this mostly for the purpose of eliminating a possible glare on the lenses due to the flash of the camera, rather than to avoid being recorded in a picture with glasses.  This may seem strange, but I wore my glasses even while swimming and showering. I still find this incredible today. The spots of water on the lens would no doubt affect my vision, but I felt that seeing spots before my eyes would be better than seeing one big blur. It is not as though I was blind. I could see figures of people and objects, just not with precision.

I believe I hid behind my glasses. They created a wall for me to separate myself from the harsh reality of the real world and allowed me to live my own, separate life.  The last time I wore those glasses was in summer school before ninth grade started. I sat for my school picture that would represent my ninth year of school taken in those glasses. Soon after that, my mom bought me contact lenses for my new high school career. I scratched the picture of me wearing the glasses out of my sister's yearbook with an ink pen. The freedom I felt when I got rid of the red glasses was great. Everyone could see me for me, instead of as the girl who wore stupid red glasses. I had worn them at such a hard age. In middle school, other kids would pick on the weaker ones to nurture their own insecurity.

I can't tell you much about the time between 6th and 8th grade because I don't remember those years. I made myself forget, much like a war veteran tries to forget the horrors of the war. It was the same for me. I didn't want to remember. I wanted to forget that I ever wore those glasses. And so I forgot those years during which I wore them had ever existed. The only years I remember of them are elementary school, when the kids were still relatively non-judgemental.

I developed a dislike for my glasses only after I got contact lenses. When I looked back in retrospect at how I looked with contacts compared with how I had looked in glasses, I felt betrayed by the spectacles. I had depended upon them solely, so it would have been in my best interests to love them at the time I needed them.

There were no actual times of despair due to my glasses. No specific events to herald the misery of my life. I wasn't miserable at that time. I was happy, carefree. The misery I remember now I have only discovered in my mind by comparing the difference between my life in high school with how my life in middle school had been. I recently thought I must have been miserable because how could I have been happy being ignored and invisible?

When writing a memoir, one must be careful not to enter this figmented detail and incorporate it with the truth. Even while in the preliminary stages of this memoir, I truly believed I had been miserable. Only after my mother reminded me that I had been cheerful during those years of my life did I remember. Often the true and unbiased version of a story can only be found when one calls upon several witnesses' rendition of the event.

I have had dreams about these same glasses in the past year. I think the reason for this is because now I have come back to face that past. I have dreamt that my contact lenses would no longer have enough strength to allow me to see, and I would have to wear my glasses over them. Then whomever I had a crush on at the time would appear and see me in the glasses. To me, it was a nightmare.

Who knows, maybe it wasn't the glasses after all. Perhaps I'm being overly dramatic about a simple peice of eyewear. Maybe it was just me. I was shy, and was years later maturing than all the girls in my classes. They were becoming young women while I was left behind as a child. Since I had passed that stage and caught up with my age, I had forgotten how frustrating it was for me. But now, the time in my life that I had forgotten all about, the problems, the way I refused to let myself think that I was miserable, that has all come back to me now by remembering the glasses. Those same stupid, square, red glasses.