“Don’t hate me.”

My husband said it while he was unwinding the bandages from my eyes.

I was sitting up in a hospital bed. Machines beeped softly somewhere to my left. The air smelled like antiseptic and the cheap lemon soap they use in every hospital bathroom. I could feel each layer of gauze loosening, one turn at a time. Cool air touched my eyelids for the first time in two days.

“Before you see this,” Nigel said, “I need to tell you that everything isn’t the way you think.”

I let out a nervous laugh.

“What does that even mean?”

He didn’t answer. His hands kept moving. Slowly. Carefully. The way they’d always moved.

But they were shaking.

I’d been married to this man for twenty years. I’d felt his hands shake exactly once before, the night before our son was born.

My heart started racing.

The last layer came away.

And light came through my eyelids.

I need to go back before I tell you what I saw.

I need to tell you how I lost it.

I lost my sight when I was eight.

It started as a stupid playground joke that spun out of control.

It was the last week of August. The air was thick and hot, and the cicadas were screaming in the trees. I was on the swings in our neighborhood park, pumping my legs as hard as I could. I loved the swings more than anything. I loved that moment at the very top, when your stomach drops and for a split second you’re not attached to anything at all. Like flying.

I remember laughing at something my neighbor’s son said.

His name was Niye. That’s what everyone on our street called him. His baby sister couldn’t say his real name, so it stuck, and by the time I knew him nobody called him anything else.

We’d grown up on the same street. His house was three doors down from mine, the one with the green shutters and the basketball hoop with no net. We’d been riding bikes and catching fireflies together since we were four. He was a year older than me, skinny, with a bad haircut his mom did in their kitchen, and he was always, always trying to be the funniest kid on the block.

That summer he had a scar over his left eyebrow. A fresh one, still pink. He’d split it open on the monkey bars in July and needed four stitches. I’d called him Frankenstein for a week. He’d pretended to be mad, but he liked it.

“Bet you can’t go higher than that!” he teased, standing behind the swing.

“Watch me!” I shot back.

I leaned back and kicked my legs out.

The next thing I felt was a sharp shove from behind. Two hands, flat on my back, at the very top of the swing.

He meant it as a joke. I know that now. He wanted to send me higher.

But I wasn’t ready for it. I lost my grip. My small hands slipped off the chains, and I flew backward instead of forward.

There was a sickening crack when my head hit a jagged rock near the mulch border.

That’s the last thing I ever saw as a child. The sky tipping upside down, blue and white, and the green leaves of the oak tree over the swings.