Scrolling my Facebook news feed, I read a meme posted by a friend that said, “My biggest fear is surviving the zombie apocalypse only to discover I have just one contact left.”
The scenario sent shivers down my spine! A world without my contacts? This planet just became a much scarier place.
I’m not one to believe in such a thing as a zombie or an organized zombie uprising resulting in Armageddon. I find survivalists to be survival nuts, and I fear the undead’s lusting after a healthy helping of my brain as much as I do an eight-legged shark.
Yet when presented with the premise of living in Zombieland without an underground bunker full of contact lenses, I felt my hands becoming a little sweaty. Suddenly, the absurd seems like something worth preparing for because, let’s be clear here (seeing as my vision certainly won’t be), I would not survive one day if left to my natural eyesight.
I have been a member of the four-eyed family since I was in first grade. Oh, the good old days, when I only had to put on glasses to read what was written on the chalkboard. Now I have to put on my glasses to read what’s written on my hand.
You laugh because you think I’m joking.
Stop.
This is my sad, fuzzy, squinty reality.
I remember when I got my first pair of glasses — dark pink with green zigzagging lines. Only two other kids in our class had glasses, the most popular girl in our grade and the boy who was my best friend and on-again/off-again crush for the bulk of my childhood.
Glasses put me in good company and, I thought, would lead to instant popularity, love and devotion. They did not. Perhaps I picked the wrong pair.
After an unfortunate accident during a game of “bespectacled pterodactyl” with a stuffed dinosaur, my glasses and a car pulling out of the driveway, it was time to get a new pair of specs. My vision had already plummeted, and I was instructed to wear my glasses whenever I was reading or watching anything more than about 10 feet away.
With the increased wearing time, this new pair needed to scream style!
Glamour!
Sass!
I opted for the thick, plastic, carnation pink optical frames. They went perfectly with my huge perm and braces adorned with alternating pink and green rubber bands. I was the epitome of cool.
Oddly, no one else saw it that way.
In the following years, I begged for contacts. Glasses fall off. They break. They inhibit my sweet moves when playing sports, I explained. It took my surviving a turtle shell pair of glasses and a frameless pair before my mom consented to contacts when I was in eighth grade.
For once, my new visual aid actually did change my life.
Over the years, I grew very attached to my contacts — sometimes quite literally. When I worked as a tour guide in the Outback, I would leave my contacts in for the duration of our weeklong treks.
I never had to worry about my glasses breaking or bending out of shape. I grew accustomed to throwing a couple of extra contacts in my bag and knew I was set for whatever life threw at me.
But the zombie scenario isn't about what life is throwing at me. It's about what non-life is throwing at me!
There is little I could possibly find more frightening than living among the undead while unable to see. Who knows how long the apocalypse would take? I could very easily run out of boxes of contacts while on the run.
And at the end, I’d be left nearly blind and unable to determine whether the person running toward me with outstretched arms is my mom coming in for a hug or a zombie coming in to eat my brain. Or my mom, having turned into a zombie, coming in to do both! The horror!
Don’t try to quell my fears by telling me that I can always wear my glasses. You can’t rely on glasses in times such as these! Everyone knows that! You’d be running, for sure, and sweaty. Glasses would fall off. They’d break. They’d reflect the light and let the zombies know where you’re hiding. I’m just saying, the time to prepare is now.
I see only one solution: laser eye surgery.
It’s Lasik — or the zombies win.