Remember this lesson from grade school, some fact about how dogs can smell one thousand times better than humans, hawks can hear forty-five times better, a fly can taste the intricacies of your garbage disposal through its feet ? Do you remember what humans can do? We can use our judgment. When orbs, colors, and visions unknown start swooping into your line of sight, your first thought is that something is deeply wrong. Pare life down to its essentials: husband, apartment, work, cheap thrills on the weekends. A year of drinking Miller Light in smoky bars, of being among real people, of learning to get by Where Real America Lives, seemed like the right thing. Though we weren’t over the moon to move- Terre Haute wasn’t exactly on our radar, we’d joke-we decided that it would be good for us. I have always balanced my introverted artistic daydreamy side with my high powered businesswoman side-the side that likes being successful, likes seeing a certain amount of work equal a certain level of success. Immersed in mid twenties’ panic at being the age for adults and having nothing to show for it, we went into survival mode and I took the first real job I was offered. Then she shoved the shrink-wrapped box into our hands with high colors in her cheeks. She mumbled something about teenagers stealing them. I made a loud joke and I was about to get even more crude when my husband asked the woman behind the counter to unlock it for us. We jiggled the handle a few times, then stood around feeling like we were breaking some kind of rule. Or maybe it’s this: We discovered that the grocery store by our apartment keeps its condoms locked being a glass cabinet in the pharmacy section. She laughed and revealed a mouthful of braces. One of them, a skinny white girl in cut-off jean shorts and a dirty blond ponytail, clutched a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, newly purchased, still in their twinkling plastic wrap. A whole street’s worth of houses and no one to help.Īnd then this: After watching an empty street for hours, I saw a trio of babygirls emerge from the smoke shop next to the café where I was sitting by the window. I was furious when I got back to the car. The house closest to where we found the dog was unlocked, I let him inside and shut the door behind him. When no one answered, I started trying knobs. While my husband kept the car running I knocked on doors up and down the street. It limped away from me, wretched, numb in its movements. I got out of the car and held my hand out to the dog.

Last month’s unlit Christmas lights wound their way around unpainted porches. Shovels were stuck upright in the frozen snow like scarecrows. Here’s why: One winter’s day, we drove through a deserted neighborhood and stopped where a dog with no collar picked its way through the ice. Why do the numbers lie to me? Why do I feel like I am experiencing this smallness of scope for the first time? It didn’t feel like that at the time of my girlhood it felt like endless dirty streets to wander. Recent census data, however, puts Terre Haute at around 62,000, which is 40,000 more people than my hometown, which makes Ypsilanti, Michigan the actual smallest town I’ve ever lived in. I often follow it up with a list of all the things we lack-we’re such a small town, we don’t have a Target, we don’t have much of a downtown, we don’t have art and culture and life and interesting ethnic restaurants. My response when people ask how it is ends up being something about how Terre Haute is the smallest town we’ve ever lived in. We moved to Terre Haute, Indiana about a year ago. Put another way: You’re never alone again. You’re never sound in your judgment anymore because the line between healthy and not healthy is blurred. The problem is, even when you know what it is, even when there is a perfectly benign and reasonable explanation, when you start seeing things-well, you’ve started seeing things. If you stare long enough at a blank white space or inside the warm dark of your eyelids, you’ll never see just plain blank. In fact, you probably see these things too. Entoptic means “within the visual” and so when I see these zips and flashes I’m actually seeing the weird flotsam and jetsam inside my eyeball. These are all variety of entoptic phenomena. The things I see are not always unpleasant. And as I fall asleep I get treated to gently pulsating, rolling shapes in fuchsia and navy. If I blink fast in bright light I can see latticework, tiny bluish branches of electricity. A bonfire spark in the corner of my vision, an orb the size of a fingernail hovering for a moment or two.

Entoptic phenomena quotes