I knew the moon was whole that night because the air always became full of something unknown every time it did. Often, I could even feel the strange and precious magic running like wild fire in my veins. It poured out of my fingertips as I worked my art. Like a woman possessed I worked until the early morning hours, creating things that I packed and shipped off to a gallery in New York.

In the beginning, I didn’t tell Sasha Smirnov, the owner of the gallery, that I was blind. I wanted people to buy my pieces because they were beautiful, and thought provoking, not because they were created by an artist with a “condition”.

I didn’t want to be indulged.

I wanted to be judged like everybody else. As far as I was concerned, blindness to an artist was not disability or a disability to be pitied. It was an advantage to be envied. I think the thing that shocked Sasha the most was my use of colors.

“Does someone tell you which colors to use?” he asked, circling me restlessly as I worked on my sculpture.

“No.”

“Have you ever been able to see?”

“I was born blind.”

“But how do you know colors if you have never seen them?’ he asked, baffled.

“I feel them, by smell and texture.”

“The colors smell different?” he asked, astonished.

“Absolutely.”

He stood behind me and watched me work for a whole day, but he left for New York none the wiser. I suppose it must be impossible for those with sight to comprehend a life based not on what your eyes tell you, but what your other senses show you.

He couldn’t understand that the images in my brain were no less vivid than those in the world he lived in. He assumed that I lived in terrible darkness. He was shocked when I told him my blindness was a gift. I’m better blind. I’m blessed. My art is more beautiful because I can’t see.

“Don’t you want to see?” he asked incredulously.

I chewed my bottom lip. To be perfectly honest no one had ever asked me that before. “I don’t know,” I told him truthfully.

“Why not? If someone asked me if I wanted to experience something new, I’d say, yes.” He seemed genuinely perplexed.

I thought about his statement carefully. “But what if you had to give up something very precious to you to have that experience?”

He couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. “What do you have to give up?” he asked incredulously.

It was impossible to explain. Depth, motion, perspective, vantage point, surfaces, contours, edges, and other characteristics that sighted people seem to completely miss. When I touch a piece of wood, it talks to me. I don’t see it as a piece of wood.

No one else in my family was blind so when I was young people would pity me a lot, but they shouldn’t have. Since I had never experienced sight, it had no physical, psychological, or social meaning. As a child I wasn’t even aware that I was without sight.

I ran down the stairs, swam, played in the garden, ate, talked, fought with my brother. I was constantly bumping into walls and furniture, and always wore a collection of bruises in different stages of healing. My mother said I’d fall, and if I wasn’t hurt too badly, I would pick myself up and run off into my next adventure totally unaware what the fuss was all about.

When I grew older I learned that the world was designed for people with sight. My mother taught me that it could take me twice as long, but I could always do whatever I wanted.

When it was time for me to go to a school, my mother told me I was too special for a little school like the one we had in Durango Falls. She was adamant she would teach me herself.

After she died many years later, I found her diaries, and had them all translated into braille. That was when I realized that she had home-schooled me because she was afraid the other kids would snatch away my guide cane, steal my lunch, make fun of me … Actually, the list of misfortunes that she thought could befall me were literally endless.

It made my eyes well with tears to know how frightened she had been for me, but how wise she was never to let even a single one of her fears infect me. It allowed me to trust fearlessly. Even when I had no reason to, I simply trusted and never stopped believing in myself.

Nobody believed I could ride, but I trusted my horse and she put wings on my back. She went from giddy up to breakneck speed real fast, but I just hung on like a tick, the wind in my hair, and the knowledge buried in my heart that I could lasso the moon if I really, really tried. When she came to a sudden halt I went flying into the air, but I landed well so that was okay too.

When we were young Elaine would do that thing with the puddles, where she would shout, “puddle” while we were out walking and I would jump to avoid stepping into it.

Sometimes she would shout puddle even though there was no puddle. I would jump and she would laugh at me. It should have made me angry, but it didn’t. I liked to hear her laugh.

When you trust, good things happen.