SWARTHOS

Here it is late December in La La Land—a place that had traded its vibrancy for an Orwellian haze, where dreams and nightmares danced together under a haunting veil of thick fog. I had an appointment with my ophthalmologist at nine, a grim ritual that felt more like a necessary penance in this surreal cesspool of acne-faced celebutants and street performers in pursuit of their fifteen minutes of fame. Naturally, I aimed to be there fifteen minutes early, but Los Angeles has a way of turning time into a twisted rubber band, sniping your best intentions like a sniper in a tower.

I checked in, feeling the weight of my high eye pressures—it was a baleful 34 in each eye! Doctor’s orders had me drenching my retinas in eye drops like some modern-day opiate addict, desperate for relief. But as I crossed the threshold into that waiting room, the atmosphere thickened like molasses. The place was crawling with syrupy misery—a cacophony of coughs and wheezes that sounded more like a scene plucked from an old-time tuberculosis ward than an eye specialist’s office. Children howled and mothers clawed at their sanity; it was pandemonium amid a fog of mismanaged health crises.

I nestled into a corner, clutching my survival instincts, while time ticked by like a morose metronome. After half an hour of swirling anxiety and relentless stares from feverish eyes, I feigned some back discomfort—because who wouldn’t with this motley crew surrounding me? — and made my way outside to the hallway that felt like a no-man’s land between sanity and chaos.

An episode unfolded that would haunt me: a large woman, her jaw a monument of urban despair, swung a right hook that landed square on the side of her son’s head. The boy’s skull whipped around in a heartbreaking arc as if he were a prizefighter on the ropes. For a brief moment, the noise of the waiting room ceased, and I was awash in the slap of reality, the ugly absurdity of it all. But salvation arrived in the form of my name being called.

I scuttled into the examination room like a rat escaping a sinking ship. Enlightenment didn’t come in the form of the sought-after improvement. The doc squinted through those thick lenses and declared my pressures had merely subsided—a slight retreat but a pitiful victory in a long, ongoing battle. Another eye drop, he said. Twice daily, in conjunction with the current regimen. Welcome to the land of the perpetually medicated—a delightful dystopia!

As I stumbled out into the sunlight, a cruel heavenly spotlight filtered through my still-blurred vision, courtesy of the numbing drops I had just endured. High and free, I felt oddly invincible yet precariously unmoored as I navigated the roadways of an LA morning. Everything swirled in a psychedelic blur—a Van Gogh painting come to life. They wanted me back in six weeks, six wretched weeks. In this kaleidoscope of confusion, I wondered what I might witness next in this carnival of human existence. Wisdom? Insanity? Or perhaps another unwarranted fist to the face. Such was the terrain of my life in a city strung out on dreams and desperate choices.