I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives / [...] can see /
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives /
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea /

[...]

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs /
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest– /
I too awaited the expected guest.

-excerpted from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

This week I was transported to that awkward time in high school, when we were forced to beg our parents for the holy bedsheets so we could bring them to the abandoned auditorium and (against our teacher’s better wishes) drape them atop our clothes, over our developing bodies as togas, removing our shoes and flinging them to the side, stepping onto the naked stage, embodying characters for the afternoon and pretending as if we had a clue how to pronounce their names and enact their personas down to every minuscule detail.

I was proclaimed Ophelia, mainly so my teacher could pretend to be engaged in a love affair with me and turn my cheeks bright beet in front of the whole Greek amphitheater. But I never wanted to be Ophelia. I longed to be Tiresias. He seemed so wise. So sagacious. So complex in his sexuality and his prophecies.

This week, I didn’t have to long to be Tiresias any more.

…

My wish upon a fleeting star came true. I woke up without my vison. Lost my sight for the  stars. For firework lights and blossoming blurs of impressionistic colors. An ever-changing canvas. As the hours passed, I fell into the world of the surrealists, and clocks started melting into walls, chair legs distorted and curved into the floor tiles, and everything started swirling. I took over someone’s uber-expensive acid trip. Or, I just became Tiresias. His lips were my lips and I couldn’t see, but I could see so much more and though I cried, at moments, I didn’t mind it so much.

I finally got to be Tiresias. All my old yearnings channeled fiercely into his character that lied flat and forgotten on the page of those playwright’s texts became alive again inside my beating heart. I was a living incarnation, a tulku, a new generation prophet with a prophecy and my neurosurgeon didn’t understand, so she discharged me and said, “There’s nothing wrong with your vision.”

But maybe that’s because she understood precisely. Or, it’s all the same. Or, it doesn’t matter anyway. Or, understanding comes only to those who need it. Or, this world doesn’t have to make sense to those of us that are in it. All I know is that I can see again. Or, I never stopping seeing. And I have faith. And you don’t always have know what it is that you believe in.

And whenever you doubt, as my nurse Teresa reminded me (you know, her name is pretty similar to Tiresias), you just have to remember that we all need a little Divine Intervention sometimes. And whenever you get sad or scared, you can just look down at your acrylic nails (or somebody else’s, for that matter) and smile. Somebody loves you. It’s all going to be okay.

Just ask Tiresias.

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