brooks valencia | eleven, fin

"It's gotten worse."

His mother accompanied him to his doctor's visit, speaking for him because he was only eight and he was shy and he was still working on getting his lisp under control. The doctor shone a bright light into his eyes, told him to follow his fingers.

"Hopefully not too much worse."

His vision had been a problem ever since he could remember but lately it'd been getting worse. It was like the more he grew, the worse his vison became. At that point, he didn't know it but he was minutes away from being declared technically legally blind.

Later that same day, his older brother Fjord got home early from practice and heard the news, went to find him playing in the back yard and said, "Well, at least they won't make you a laborer like Dad." Or the rest of us, he didn't say. He supposed that was a silver lining- he'd seen his father show up at the close of each and every day covered in sweat, exhausted, hungry, miserable. But if that was not to be Brooks Valencia's future, then he had no idea what it would entail.

He hoped for something easy.

Nothing usually was- not in Eleven. To survive was to suffer to some extent, he knew he wasn't special because he had problems. Maybe a bit more special because of which problems he had, but not special in any sort of way he wanted to be. Not special like Fjord, who accepted his lot in life and played the part as well as anyone could. Never got sick. Old enough and capable enough to work the fields. Brooks was just a little boy with a stutter and a fading field of vision.

And that pretty much stayed true through the years as he aged. Puberty took the last of any visual activity in his right eye, but his left could still manage to make out shapes and colors. His brother got engaged, Brooks somehow managed not to flunk freshman year. Summer came- one of his last before he graduated and his job assignment arrived. He overheard classmates talk about their plans of going swimming in the creeks, or noodling in the cranberry bogs. He never went. He blamed his eyes, but in truth his anxieties had existed long before his vision ceased to.

He'd expected life to be put on hold for as long as he needed it to be when he first put it there- it wasn't until it was too late that he even realized it'd kept moving along without him there to witness it. By this point, all his Dad talked about was the unrealistic idea of retirement some day, all his mom talked about was how worried she was. Fjord was married and moved away. He was still there, in his room, listening to water-warped cassettes of books because he couldn't see the print on pages anymore. Stories of people who hadn't forgotten to go out and live their lives.

This is the beginning of Brooks Valencia's story. Unfortunately, it is also probably the end. But if he manages in the meantime, in between his first and last breath from this moment on- to feel again, well. It'll be long enough for him.