Sometimes I think about what I will lose if my vision gets worse, I mean a lot worse. Not if I go blind, which is unlikely. But what if low vision steals the world I treasure? Ten years ago, when I first wrote about having macular degeneration, my symptoms were insignificant. Fear crept in only when I thought about what the future might hold, and possible losses arrived like snapshots—the woods I’ve known since childhood, greens shining with rain, white birches washed clean. These pictures were drawn from some vault in my mind. They left me immobilized, tears running down my face.

The visions that came to me were imagined—the wet green of ferns in the woods. Or perhaps I should say reimagined, images of experiences I had had—the very thought of losing them made the images sharp as needles. Today, that response seems sentimental, almost maudlin. After all, I still see pretty much as I always have. Yet today the loss is not imagined.

Warehouses crowd the cement pier. Metal tracks wind along the ground. I step over the tracks, walk around an idle forklift, and enter a narrow path between a warehouse and a row of shipping containers. The afternoon light fades into the shadow of the building. My hardhat slips down my forehead, my safety goggles fog. I pause, fix my hardhat, readjust my seabag on my shoulder, then continue down the path.

“This way, Surgeon,” the Medical Admin Officer, my escort, gestures.

We step out of the shadows, blinking in the July afternoon sun. The grey ship rises to meet us. The hull of the aircraft carrier is an immaculate, haze grey—there is no visible rust. The flight deck towers over the pier and for a moment it seems too high, as if the whole ship might topple over. I lean back and glimpse the top of the island, the superstructure on top of the flight deck. I wonder if the Captain is already on board. I wonder when I will meet him.

I think I remember the correct sequence for boarding the ship. I don’t want to look like an idiot, even if everyone on the ship doesn’t expect much military bearing from their medical department, only medical competence, but as the lone Ship’s Surgeon I want to set a good example.

I lay in bed listening to the steady whooshing and whirring of my husband’s new C-pap machine. I miss the staccato snorts of his snoring that had punctuated our nights for the past thirty years, sounds I hadn’t realized I relied on as my personal white-noise machine. He lies on the opposite side of our king-sized bed in a spaceage cocoon of blankets, hoses and mask. On my side of the bed, I’m restless, unable to sleep. I haven’t slept undisturbed for a full night in years. I spend my days in a sleep-deprived stupor, walking around slightly off balance, banging a knee on the coffee table, dropping the butter dish on the kitchen floor.

When my daughter was a little girl she would ask me to trace lines lightly around her face to put her to sleep. I remember the feel of her soft skin as my finger brushed across her forehead, down her nose, around her cheeks and back again. Around and around until her breath slowed and she fell asleep. I try tracing lines on myself, but it tickles and makes me want to scratch my nose.

From the backyard of my childhood home, I watched while dusk dropped down around me. Hints of mauve and tangerine streaked this way, that way, spilling across a pewter sky. Crickets chirped. Bullfrogs bellowed. Clouds dotted in the distance like scales.

This was late August in Roscoe, Illinois, a small town outside of Rockford, a Rust Belt Midwestern city once dominated by manufacturing. I was twenty years old— spinning and directionless—and I’d recently moved back home for the duration of the summer, before starting my junior year of college. My auburn hair bobbed against my shoulders. I wore cutoff shorts, a strappy tank top with a flannel tied around the waist and no shoes.

I picked up my wine glass from a nearby Adirondack chair on the back porch and took a sip. Then another. Sips became swallows and cabernet raced down my throat. I felt my body liven and hum with a buzz. I set my empty glass down and walked through the grass to the spot where our yard merged with forty-five acres of field. Tall blades of grass tickled and itched at my ankles. Flat field stretched to the horizon, where I became hooked, moored, unable to look away.

“Next time won’t you sing with me.”

I paused to take a breath.

“A-B-C-D, E-F-G.”

She told me I had been singing the alphabet song on repeat for days.

“H-I-J-K, lolla-lolla-P.”

This next time, however, I stopped midsong.

“Momma,” I asked, “what word starts with ‘lolla-lolla-P’?”

My mother reminded me of this anecdote when my own son began to recognize letter shapes and sounds. It’s one of those stories parents enjoy telling about their children, a humblebrag only barely excused by the disarming naïveté of the child. Stories like these reassure us that the kids are alright. We’re never sure if it’s despite or because of us, but in each retelling, we trust our parenting a little bit more.

After dinner at the Thai restaurant in the center of Taos, I suggest to my date that we drive to the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, a so-called tourist site. He’s from out of town and has never been there.

I head west on a two-lane highway shouldered by acres of blanched mesa and withering sage. This steel-deck bridge stretches across a chasm lined with unforgiving cliffs of jagged basalt created by eons of volcanic eruptions. I’ve pressed my breastbone against the railing, hung my head towards the whitewater below. I’ve felt the hum of the Rio Grande across my cheeks, a dirge that rises past layers of ash and bits of bone and flesh. The handset that hangs from the defunct suicide call box twists in my memory—it’s coiled around my DNA.

As I drive, I decide against telling him about the two Taos kids I knew who jumped. I want to think about sex, not their suicides, or my younger brother’s. Though Richie died in New York, and not Taos, the memory of my brother hovers in the backseat and clicks his seatbelt. I blink to squeeze the tears from my eyes and focus on the quivering double-yellow line. I don’t know why I’m drawn to this thing that terrifies me. I’m prone to such momentary lapses of the rational.

The sun sinks behind the mountains. A white haze smears across the sky. The road crests, then the bridge comes into view. Red lights flash a too-late warning. A sheriff’s car blocks the way. Two state troopers lean against its hood. No ambulance among the emergency vehicles. The drunken noodles rock hard in my gut.

“Accident?” my date asks.

“Someone just jumped,” I say, brandishing my authority as a Taos local.