The True Identity of 'I Can't See It Anymore'

Only four characters fit on one screen of my mother's smartphone.
I tried to fix it, thinking I was being helpful, but a week later, she called me.

Only four characters fit on one screen of the smartphone at my parents' house.

It ends with 'Th', 'a', 'n', 'k', and the 's' comes on the next screen. My mother reads it by flipping through it line by line with her thumb. It takes about ten flips just to read a short reply.

I can't see it if it's small, so I make it big. That's what my mother said.

I let her show me. It was certainly big. It was so big that I couldn't tell what was written. It was more like a pattern than text.

I opened the settings and lowered the display size by two levels. The text shrank, and the sentences fit on the screen. While I was at it, I also lowered the notification volume. It was loud enough to echo throughout the house, and I could tell what kind of message had arrived even from the next room.

See, now you can read it all at once.

My mother moved the screen away, brought it closer, and moved it away again. That's amazing, she said. I thought that had solved the problem.

A week later, the phone rang. My mother calls even when she has no business, but her voice sounded different that day.

Kaede. Ever since then, I haven't been able to see it.

I thought, as I suspected, I had made it too small. It was a mistake to adjust someone else's screen based on my own vision. For an elderly person, what counts as 'readable' must be different from my 'readable.' I apologized over the phone and said I would come home next weekend.

On Saturday, I climbed the hill and arrived at my parents' house. My calves were tight. While wiping off my sweat at the entrance, I asked to see her smartphone as soon as I went inside.

The screen was normal. It was the same size I had set, and the text was clearly visible. I tried opening a message and handed it to my mother.

I can't read it, my mother said.

She said she couldn't read it whether she brought it closer or moved it away. Tilting my head, I suddenly asked, Where are your glasses?

My mother had a look of realization.

From there, we searched the whole house. In front of the Buddhist altar, on the telephone stand, under the floor cushions, in the gaps of the kotatsu quilt. I got down on my knees and crawled on the tatami mats, so my lower back started to hurt halfway through. My mother touched the top of her head and said, They're not here. I touched my own head just in case. They weren't there.

After searching for about twenty minutes, I got thirsty. I opened the refrigerator to get some barley tea.

Next to the egg carton, there were her reading glasses. The temples were folded neatly, and they were placed horizontally. It was a way of placing them that made me think someone must have put them there intentionally.

Ah, so that's where it was.

When I asked when she had put it in there, my mother said she thought it was when she was putting away the eggs. Her hands must have been full. Even so, there must have been several opportunities to notice before she closed the door.

I wiped her glasses with a cloth and handed them to her. My mother put them on, picked up her smartphone, and looked at the screen. The first thing she did was open the photo I had sent her last week. It was just a photo of some loquats I bought at the market, arranged on a plate. She used her fingers to zoom in and look at it closely.

It took three minutes to fix the text. It took twenty minutes to find the glasses.

On the way home, I suggested we stop by the optician. If we made a spare pair, she wouldn't have to worry if she lost one. My mother said it was a waste. Even while saying it was a waste, she spent thirty minutes choosing the color of the frames.

In the end, she chose red.

If they're this color, you'll be able to find them even if they end up in the fridge. When I said that, my mother laughed and said she wouldn't put them in there.

#Essay #4-panelManga #MotherAndDaughter #ReadingGlasses