to miss and make out...

On certain days, there would be such fog outside of our window that it almost appeared as if somebody had painted the glass white. There was nothing out there, not a thing, just this shapeless whiteness. I would stare at it for what appeared to be hours, trying to make anything out, anything. We lived on the 8th floor, far above the tree line, of the young trees planted in the freshly made dirt around our buildings. It would sometimes take more than an hour indeed for the fog to settle, branches would eventually emerge from the whiteness, then the faint shapes of flat looking crowns of trees, some transformer box here, a street lamt there, then headlights, then cars.

There were other days on which I would lock myself in a seemingly perfectly dark room, ... and then wait for the first shapes to emerge. It would sometimes take more than 10 minutes for me to be able to see the bathtub, or the photographic equipment of my father's darkroom. The darker the room, the longer the period of pure anticipation. Did I really see something, was I just imagining it? I knew that I could exit this voluntary blindness at any time, by just opening the door, just stepping back out into the light.
I think it was only once, in the mountains, at our weekend house, in Koszarawa Cicha, in Poland, where the light never became enough for me to see anything... I stared at where I knew there was a ceiling, I looked over towards the walls... and there was nothing. It was a complete darkness, one that did not seem to be out there, but inside of me, not in front of my eyes, more behind my eyes. I tried to reach into it, but it felt like nothing... I think I was pretty scared.
I remember waking up before everybody else in the house on the following morning, into a complete darkness again, I waited patiently, it took a really long time...
In the place where the window shutters had been closed, red ovals eventually appeared, they then turned somehow less bloody, and they slowly became the branch circles in the wood of the window shutters... My brain used this tiny amount of light to somehow reassemble the room for me, I began to see the inside of the house again... I was able to find the door.

I am not sure if I looked straight at the sun on this particular day, but I know I used to, sometimes. A blue and green disk would appear in front of the glowing star, A shaking blueish disk, obviously my eye trying to not go completely blind.
The blue disk would then stay with me for quite some time, the after image of the sun, one that only I could see and that I could then follow, as it was jumping, seemingly randomly wherever I was about to look.
If I managed to relax enough, the burned in blue circle would just slowly sink to the ground, like a deflated ghost friend who became tired of jumping around the apartment... as soon as I became aware of this observation however, he was ready to jump around again, of course...

I am not sure why a rainy morning like the one today would make me think of some of my childhood's eye-games...
The rain has been pushed forcefully against the window for some time now, if I step close enough to the glass, I can see the world exploded by thousands of little water lenses. A bit like the slow glass photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama...
Time to leave the house again. Just a few more minutes left here...