To Depth Perception

I don’t know you, but I love you. I love the idea of you. Depth perception. The flat surface is actually layered, that curved and angled line actually goes somewhere.

Perhaps as an infant, I saw the world with depth: my dad’s nose, the set of keys he dangled in front of me, my sister as she pushed my face back and forth in whatever weird game she was playing. But early on, one of my eyes turned in, and they never worked in concert again.

I never knew what I saw was flat. It had depth the way a painting has depth. People far away were smaller and grew bigger as they approached. A road’s edges would form a V and the point of the V was farther away.

But catch a ball? I thought I was clumsy. Play tennis? I thought I was slow. Hit a baseball? Those who can, I thought, have a particular genius. First out in dodgeball. Last picked on any team.

Learning to drive took longer than average. Not the mechanics of it, shifting gears and scanning the mirrors. But training my brain to sense all that quickly changing sense of space. Cars to the right of me, the distance of the curb. Parallel parking was maddening.

Still, I didn’t know. I didn’t know until I was 37 and in an optometrist's office. The assistant gives me a 3-D test: it looks like a sheet of negatives, black and grey, with 6 circles, each with a dot in the middle. “Which one looks like it’s popping out?” Is she joking? What does she mean by “popping out”? I move it back and forth, up and down. “None of them,” I answer.

“Not one? Try these glasses,” she says, handing me a pair.

“None,” I say.

And I realize, right there, this explains it. I have no depth perception. I make it up, I’m always guessing. Distance seems random to me. And most people see the world differently.

One day, years later, I am explaining this to a colleague and he’s stunned. “So I wonder,” he says, “what the world looks like to you?”

“Hmmm...I wonder what it looks like to you...” I reply. We both glance down the long hall, office doors getting smaller near the end, trying to imagine the difference.