She was beautiful. He didn’t need eyes to know that. The first time Theodora drove him home, his dad had said, “Holy shit she’s hot.” He heard his dad chuckle. “She waved goodbye.” “She facepalmed.” “Oh wow, she just flashed her boobs.” His dad liked to keep up a running commentary peppered with absurd exaggerations. There was a time when his father would paint exotic fantasy landscapes for his son’s overactive imagination, and Garret loved him for it. Truthfully, magical creatures still sometimes appeared in the backdrop of his mind’s eye. It didn’t matter that he was 28 and knew better.
SynePark was a daycare for blind people more or less. Part education, part therapy, they specialized in providing sensory stimulation for the vision-impaired, who often closed themselves off from their sight-biased society. There were cutting edge programs for sound design, chemical engineering, culinary arts, and a cache of materials that associates(patients) were encouraged to experiment with at every whim. Garret met Theodora when he signed up for sculpture classes. It was a medium conducive to communication, as Theodora explained, she rarely used her eyes when sculpting. “So yeah, if your piece turns out shitty, you can’t pull out your handicap card.” He could tell when someone was smiling through their words. Theodora had a way of treating him like he wasn’t impaired at all, just a different sort of human. She was a volunteer when he met her. At his request she was hired on. She spent some of her time with groups, and the rest as his…what? Assistant? Guide? Companion? He didn’t know, exactly, but he understood that he was diagnosed with exaggerated introversion tendencies, and so followed a custom curriculum. Until he met Theodora, his father was the only person in his life.