My friend had eye surgery a few months ago. He had poor vision and astigmatism, which also gave him headaches.

When he started to describe the procedure, I got shivers down my spine. The doctor removed the first layer of his eye with some kind of a spoon-shaped scalpel. I had to stop him there — the thought of anyone doing anything to my eyeballs makes me cringe. In moments like these, I'm glad I have aphantasia and can't visualize descriptions. I don't think I'd even be able to put in contact lenses. Even when I watch movies with blood and gore, the only thing that gets to me is when someone does something to a character's eyes.

My friend is really enjoying his new vision. He made comments like, "Everything's so HD!" Usually when people get their sight corrected, they say things like, "I didn't realize you could make out the individual leaves on trees!" He said he'd never noticed how filthy our city was.

Anyways, all that talk about eyes made me go and get my own vision checked, which confirmed that I also have astigmatism, just as I suspected. It's annoying at night — when you look at lights, you see streaks of light, and it's all blurry. I'm used to it, though — I've had it all my life and it doesn't bother me that much. My astigmatism is very mild, and my vision is generally good, so it doesn't really need correction. But I wonder if it causes headaches or fatigue and I don't even realize it because I'm so used to it? So I decided to get myself a pair of glasses.

The feeling of wearing glasses was really unusual. I didn't notice any big changes at first. Everything looked sharper and that's about it. But when I started walking, I felt like I'd gotten... shorter? Like physically closer to the ground. Apparently, they distort periphereal vision, which is barely noticeable, but it still gave the effect. Your brain is supposed to adjust to this over a few days or weeks.

Two days later, I went to see my friend. The sky was finally clear, so I thought it'd be cool to look at the moon and the stars. My buddy and his big brother had been trying to spot comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, but sadly, it'd been cloudy for weeks, so they never caught sight of it. Better luck next time — in 71 years! However, the telescope was still there, so we did get to see the moon, Jupiter with four of its satellites, and some random stars. Other than the moon and Jupiter, everything else is basically one single bright pixel, so it's a little underwhelming when you don't know what you're looking at. But the moon and Jupiter were cool.

When we were done with the telescope, my friend asked me, "Can you see the dark side of the moon?"

"Yeah, with glasses I can. On some days, I can see it without glasses too. Why?"

"I didn't realize the dark side of the moon was visible to the naked eye. I could never see it before my eye surgery."

I find this observation much more interesting than leaves on trees or dirty streets.