When had she fallen asleep? The loud knocking on the door, the yelling through it pulling her from a deep and dreamless sleep, she awoke on August 11th, at 11 in the morning, two weeks before her first semester of college. Her mother had shouted something, what was it exactly? The words had been muddled by her sleep-haze and the old, but solid, door she had stood behind. She heard the dog barking downstairs, was it about the barking? Or maybe she forgot some appointment? God forbid that she overslept and missed her time with the oral surgeon. It wasn’t like she had to visit him once a month since her surgery. How would she ever survive? She rubbed at her eyes, only slightly more coherent than her initial wake up, and asked her mother to repeat it, and she did.

Falling from her bed and tangled in the sheets and confused on when, exactly, she fell asleep, she ignored the creeping sensation that threatened to settle in her stomach. That couldn’t have been what she said. That couldn’t be right. The growing fear and anxiety that only grew faster, hitting her like a rock, or perhaps better to say a train, as she stumbled towards the door now. Maybe she had just misheard her. After all, the door was blocking and distorting the sound. Maybe it had been a joke. A really bad joke that nobody should ever play, that her mother would never make. Maybe it was still a dream. If she thought hard enough, as she did in most dreams (if this could even be called one, it more resembled a nightmare where so many things went wrong, compounding on one another) then maybe she could restart it, making the dream do something different. When had she fallen asleep?

It was summer, almost five in the morning. She had been on a call with a close friend, quietly talking in the early morning, sun just starting to threaten the horizon as they spoke about their fears, their dreams. They had been on the phone for hours, as was their custom, and hadn’t even thought of hanging up yet, still so much on her mind that she wanted to discuss before time was up. She had been exhausted, trying in vain to fix her sleep patterns. She remembered the clock reading seven, remembered curling up under her blankets, phone beside her head, and asking what her friend was planning for tomorrow. Was that when she fell asleep?

Now, she opened the door and stared at her mother, feeling the world begin to slip away from underneath her feet, her grip on the door frame growing tighter. Tighter. Tighter in some vain attempt to ground herself, trying to pull herself from whatever nightmare she had woken up in. She listened, with growing horror, as her mother said it for a third time. Your father just lost his job.

She needed her glasses.

Out of bed, she stumbled around her room, searching for her glasses. Fingers slithering, slipping, sliding, along the soft and tousled fabric of her bed, seeking a hard lump or distortion in the well-worn sheets, any sign of the black frames she adored. Had they fallen off in her sleep? When she had laid down in bed, still on the phone, she remembered them on her face, the casual discomfort of laying on a pillow with her glasses on was clear in her mind. Had she placed them somewhere when she was blind in the darkness of her room? It wasn’t impossible. It is the constantly plight of many a glasses-wearer to lose their glasses when not wearing them. She tore off the sheets, stepping onto the pile to reach farther into her bed. Vision blurring, heart pounding, ears ringing, panic built and bubbled in her chest, she was at the brink of breaking. She needed her glasses.

Her mother snapped at her. Go downstairs and walk the dog, she’s waiting. She couldn’t help it. Yelling, she demanded to know why she couldn’t have just a few minutes to put herself together, to find her glasses before she stumbled blindly down the stairs and into the street, still in her pajamas. She had just woken up after all, it wasn’t fair to demand so much of her so soon. Had her mother not had a few minutes to compose herself before telling her the news? Had her father not been allowed a second the process the words in his email? She turned, expecting a response from her mother, but she had already left. She needed her glasses. Maybe they were on her desk.

What was she expecting when she looked through those lenses? Earlier, the world had started to slip beneath her feet. She had felt the dread growing, settling like a rock in her stomach, but it had been overwhelmed by the bubbling panic that chose to live in her chest. When her mother had spoken a third time, clearly for her to hear, the world did not slip, but instead was violently ripped away, like a rug, from under her. At some point in her searching, the world had returned underneath her, but it was different now. The moment in her room, her mother’s words, were surreal. She was floating now, gliding as if through a dream. The world beneath her was tilted and wrong. Months from now, when she looks back on this moment in time, that same tilt to the world will still remain. Had that truly been her life? Perhaps it never was. Her glasses.

Sliding along the bookshelf, bumping into a familiar object, her fingers found them first, tucked away between an alarm clock and a book she couldn’t recognize. Her hand wrapped around the frames, smudging the already dirty-glass, and she pushed them onto her face, feeling the lenses pushing against her lashes.

Nothing changed.