This happened a few months ago.
“Do you want the gauze?” the doctor’s assistant asked me.
I had just had an injection in my eye for retinal vein occlusion.
“Yes,” I told her, “it helps the soreness.”

I drove out.

And found operating with one eye tipped the balance.
If I turn left, I head toward Costco.
If I turn right, I head toward the smaller street.
I decided to turn right.
I drove all the way across to the left lanes.
There were no cars around to guide me.

I felt unease, something felt off.
If I am going to turn left, I should be all the way across.
I was still musing on it
when I saw a stream of cars heading straight at me.

I went very calm.
It was as though something took me over,
and everything was in slow motion.
My mind, as though far away, registered:
The cars are coming at me.
I am in the wrong lane.
I should move right.
I moved into the safe yellow lane,
and was moving into the right lane when a car honked at me.
Oh, I better just stay in the safe yellow lane to the intersection.
All the while, my mind was in that calm, frozen state,
operating, yet as if from far away,
and very calm, unnaturally calm.

I reached the light and turned left,
still gripped in that state of lethargy.
My normal self would be freaking out,
going ohmigod, ohmigod, losing my head,
going into a state of emergency.
Not in this heightened state of non-feeling,
like I was there yet not there.
Me yet not me kind of feeling.
A feeling of dissociation.