Camila has a secret—her progressive blindness—that she can keep for only so long.
It took me nearly a year to come up with the title of “What You Don’t See.” As the story evolved into a deeper exploration of sexual identity and insecurities, I knew that the original title, “The Blind Date,” no longer fit. I cycled through multiple titles before settling on “What You Don’t See” just minutes before I sent in the final edits to Stillhouse Press. It turned out to be perfect. The title captures what sighted people often don’t “see” about blindness and what Camila doesn’t perceive about her own worth and agency.
Here’s the opening scene, which crystallizes the story’s tension between perception and reality:
* * *
“Which would you rather be, deaf or blind?” Meredith whispered as we sat on our sleeping bags in her chilly basement. She had found the question in a chain letter, probably on bubble gum-scented stationery. It was what passed for profundity back then as if these questions revealed some sort of existential truth. Maybe it did for me.
It was my first sleepover after moving to the neat ’burb outside of Pittsburgh where there were cul-de-sacs and pools you could only use three months a year. It was for my education, my mother said, so I would have more opportunities. Soon after my arrival, the popular girls rushed to befriend me, the city girl with a funny name and an unmarried Brazilian mother. Different, but not too different—that’s the secret to popularity when you’re eleven.
Divya, the resident drama queen, clutched her chest. “Neither! Both suck!”
I stiffened, and Jill’s voice filled the basement. “A blind woman used to live with her mother down the street. Sometimes I’d hear her coming with her stick, and it was so loud. We prayed for her at dinner.”
Divya said that she would be blind if she could play like Stevie Wonder. The girls’ faces were lost to the shadows: that part of my blindness was already setting in.
— “What You Don’t See”
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You can read the full story in In Between Spaces, available in various formats at Amazon, Stillhouse Press, and other online vendors.
© Cristina Hartmann