Bob the Blob and the Uninvited Guests

Eye floaters are like uninvited party guests, always drifting around, never helpful, and impossible to ignore.

They show up early, hover in the background, and refuse to leave, even when the party’s over and you’ve clearly put on your pajamas.

Floaters are what happen when your eyeballs decide they’re bored and want to join the rest of your body in a coordinated campaign of irritation. It’s like some kind of unionized rebellion:

Last week it was hip joints and a swollen big toe.

The week before that, my back staged a protest, and my liver spots held a press conference.

This week? Bob the Blob is acting up, a translucent jellyfish cruising through my peripheral vision like he owns the lease on my corneas.

Now, the doctors say they’re harmless. “Normal,” even.

Which is why I’ve taken to naming them.

They’re living rent-free in my head, so we may as well be on a first-name basis. There’s Bob, of course. Then Dotty. Phil sometimes shows up, but only when I’m driving at dusk.

They’re my little eye floatation device support group, always nearby, just out of reach, like that word you can’t remember or the one earring you lost in 1986.

I say they’re proof I can no longer trust anything I see, including my own eyeballs.

One minute I’m reading a label, the next I’m swatting at a ghost gnat like I’m conducting a tiny, invisible orchestra.

It’s exhausting.

Floaters are the ocular equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there. Except now it’s your eyes doing the forgetting. Or the gaslighting. It’s unclear.

At this point in life, we’ve accepted certain things:

We make weird noises when we sit.

We talk to our knees like they're coworkers.

We take supplements alphabetically.

And now… we have roommates in our eyeballs.

Aging is not for the faint of heart.

But at least now, when I wave at nothing, people assume I’m eccentric and not just losing my marbles.

Which, let’s be honest, is kind of true either way.