Ms. Cirillo saw herself in colour but was determined to impair others with the B&W so dreaded of children nurtured throughout the 90s-00s – that kind of dog-eyed boredom conditioned by AMC movies and ‘Nick @ Nite’ that evinced a sinister broadcaster’s business plan above it all, underlining HEY they’re asleep now (this was remarked, of course, between the infomercials), and yet, there you were, wondering if other kids really were asleep. Well, don’t worry, they weren’t.
BUT: Ms. Cirillo thought it’d be mindful to prompt this kind of animal thing in others and keep the cones for herself. That’s the dream. So she went about researching eyes online and in-class and learned enough to the point where she forgot about her original dream and became an optometrist because she found she already knew everything that her hobby allowed her, and she might as well make money. Ms. Cirillo was a practicing optometrist in the sandswept parking lots of Long Branch, NJ where the one person who knew her extinct dream would occasionally stop by to check up on her and make sure nothing excited or depressed her to the point of making little surgical catch work on irises, or flooding cones, or incising pupils. There’d be a lawsuit stirred up in the brown shit of legal pads with DAVE HESSELING written right below, or beside: COMPLICIT NEGLIGENCE. It was ugly but the terms weren’t up to him.
Hesseling was Ms. Cirillo’s one friend, who worked two part-time jobs when he should of/could of worked one full-time, which would of even paid more, but he likes variety, that’s what he always valued, so let him be, alright. Hesseling was thirty years old or so and the only thing that kept him going was that he kept reading symbols into things, which was some mild cognitive slight that he was well aware of but didn’t exactly hit the clinic for. Instead Hesseling kept the thing around and let it swell, eventually forgetting that it was originally a disorder type thing, which was fortunate for him. I mean, let him be, alright. But this guy would read symbols into everything, like, for example his optometrist-friend Ms. Cirillo was part of this arcane revelation rivaling John and Zarathustra but fitted for E-Z late capitalist dollars (his words, trust me). He was always very unclear about the structure of this revelation but he always called it a “RELEVATION” for a reason. He would hint at the structure of the relevation, and there definitely were chapters and hymnal choruses and he said you had to play all seventeen minutes of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” as you read the hallowed piece or you were going to miss the point. Dead serious when he’d say this. His friend Ms. Cirillo played a prominent role in his vision, something of a siren figure with wings open, feathers lightly spiraling down, harpy cawing someone over to go ape-shit on their eye sockets. Hesseling said that in the entirety of What He Sees there was A LOT (he underscored) OF PAIN involved in the actual de-colouring process, but once etiolated and B&W stasis achieved, the patient was so overwhelmed with the new sight so as to forget any pain. But beyond this, he was waiting for more symbols.
When pressed about it, he said that yeah he saw the whole thing in this internally coherent code, but what, you want me to tell you what the ciphers mean? What does this eye sucking siren mean? Hesseling would shake his head and say you’re just missing the point you always miss the point, and your inability to get the point’s probably a symbol as well. I’ll get back to you on that one.