I never used to pay much attention to what was happening outside the car window. The route to school was nothing but a blurry cruise through suburbia, splattered with blotches of ­vegetation, rushing vehicles, and the sun's glaring reflection on the windshield.

At night, streetlights danced and multiplied, darting through the sky. Masses of granite or brick bulged out of the darkness, suddenly caught by the headlights. Forms swayed in the shadows, forests were cloaked in darkness, only the faint network of branches visible. Hazy fields of stars held up the rising moon and its nimbus. The night was constantly in motion.

Over time, my smeared vision began to prevent me from reading numbers on the whiteboard. Thanks to my squinting and my sluggish reading pace, I was sent to an eye doctor. It was winter when I got my contact lenses, and I shielded my eyes as I walked to the car through blinding snowdrifts. Once in the car, I allowed my eyes to recover from the barrage of light. With the car rolling and sunglasses cooling my sensitive pupils, I took my first look at the new world.

Tree limbs burned amber in the morning light, branching out like cobwebs against the crisp, cloudless sky. Hills and buildings leapt out of the background, with borders sharp enough to slice through ice. There was no sound, only the jagged, perfect landscape.

I felt the chill of precision, of focus. I saw dust particles fluttering through the beam of a projector. On computer screens, once flat jumbles of black and white text, bold letters carved their proper places in sentences. Assertive punctuation connected it all. Life was coming alive in front of me, line by line, corner by corner.

Later, with the cold smothering the day's excitement and my breath showing against the tenebrous night, I gazed skyward. Radiant specks sprinkled across the sky, the stars blazed. In their flickering stillness, they conveyed a sense of the infinite.