Page 47 of Soft
I learned about contrast first. It was the most immediate adjustment I could make. High contrast between text and background made reading significantly easier. Default gray-on-white document formatting was one of the worst options available.
Realizing that was also what I had been using in every email I had sent him for weeks made me sick to my stomach. I changed my default font to black, bumped the size up a few notches, and switched the background color to be more accessible.
All of these were small changes. Hopefully they looked like a personal preference rather than anything deliberate.
I learned about lighting next. Warm light was easier than cool light, and indirect was better than direct. Overhead fluorescents were particularly rough. I started leaving the overhead off in whatever room we were working in when I had any say over it. I bought a floor lamp for his office and warm bulbs for the conference space.
Grizzly had done a double take the first he picked up on the change. After a few minutes, he visibly settled into the rest of the meeting with a relaxed expression.
Physical space became an important thing to consider as well. Hardwood or tile would be easier to navigate than carpet if his vision deteriorated further. You could feel transitions underfoot with the former two. The surface also gave more reflected light, a plus in the pro/con column of things.
High contrast on floor transitions and door frames helped with spatial awareness. Lever door handles were significantly easier than round knobs for someone with narrowing central vision. These things were relevant to living spaces more than to an office, but I wrote them down anyway and told myself it was purely informational for the time being.
I knew better than to lie to myself.
Because here was the thing that the research couldn't account for: I was falling in love with Grizzly. It wasn’t a halfway sort of feeling. I was deep in the trenches, fighting for my life to not show all my cards at once.
My research wasn’t actually research. It was me building a care plan. It was me preparing for our future. It was meshowingI cared.
I thought about what it meant too, from the Daddy side of things. Being someone's Daddy was already about attentiveness and consistency. It meant the other person didn’t have to spell out every need. I’d practiced versions of it in the past. I knew what it felt like to be that kind of steady for someone.
However, this was different. What Grizzly was managing with his vision was going to be a part of the future we built. And that meant the Daddy part of me needed to be built to navigate it too.
I wanted it to be instinct. I wanted him to never feel like he was being managed or accommodated in a way that drew a border around what he could and couldn't do.
Settled.
Capable.
That was the kind of Daddy I wanted to be for him. And that meant I had to know what I was working with.
I learned about what it felt like to have something happening to your sight that you couldn't stop. I read accounts from people who had gone through it. That part took the longest because I kept having to set the laptop down and look out the window for a few minutes before I could keep going.
Grizzly was going through this same thing. Their words were probably the same as what he was thinking each day.
They talked about the energy it took to manage things quietly. About calibrating every room and every piece of paper and every screen before anyone else noticed, because the alternative was someone treating you like you had become less than what you were.
They shared how the loneliest part wasn't the vision itself but the distance it created. The wall you built to hide behind that ended up keeping out the people who would have stayed anyway if you'd let them.
I thought about Grizzly at the diner adjusting his glasses and saying nothing. The way he’d said the words “new glasses” as if that would explain things away.
I thought about all the ways the man I was falling in love with had been building that wall for a long time, and how much I wanted to be standing close enough on the other side that the moment he decided to stop, he’d see me ready and waiting.
Grief hit me hard the further my research went. I wasn’t the one experiencing the loss. It wasn’t my place to feel sad about this. It shouldn’t have affected me so much.
But my heart hurt all the same for my boy. For the way this had to have been tearing him up inside.
The truth of it all was that this wasn’t a complication. This was part of who he was. And I wantedall of it. If he let me in, he’d see how true my intentions were.
I just had to wait for him to trust me with it.
The adjustments I made in my day-to-day life were easy to ignore. Most of it was subtle since I didn’t want to draw attention.
I started narrating things out loud in a natural way—reading a text before handing him my phone, describing what was on the screen before turning the laptop toward him, giving verbal directions even when the visual was right there. I stopped pointing at things from across the room and started walking to them. I positioned myself on his stronger side when we were reviewing things together. When I sent documents, they went out in the format I’d set to be easiest on his eyes.
I didn’t make any of it a thing. I didn't hint at it or look at him in a way that suggested I was doing anything differently.
The closest I came to losing my composure was one afternoon when we were reviewing a draft contract I had printed out and formatted carefully. He picked it up and read through it without any of the small adjustments I had come to recognize.
