lose my eye or I wouldn’t. This was either a big event — the night I lost my eye — or not.

“This is the David Bowie injury,” one of the ophthalmologists said.

Like me, Bowie has blue eyes. On blue-eyed people a slack black pupil is more noticeable than comparatively darker brown eyes. Bowie was punched in the face by a schoolmate wearing a ring; it was a fight over a girl.

Except for when he did go back and get the tent, he was at the hospital the whole night, in the lobby. Or standing outside smoking. At one point he filled a Nalgene with one of the beers I’d bought earlier and shared it as if trying to retain some semblance of the fun we’d planned on having that evening.

Many hours later they prescribed me various eye drops and told me there was nothing to do to fix my eye per se, but that I needed to sit, upright, in the dark, for the next five days. Upright to let the blood drain out, in the dark because of the photosensitivity, and I wasn’t to leave my house for risk that something, anything, could happen — I’d walk into a tree branch, I’d duck from a Frisbee — anything and the responsible vessel would begin bleeding again. The tiniest acts can raise the pressure inside an eye, especially an injured one. I was to rush to the hospital immediately if the bleeding began again. “Or if you see a bright light that you know isn’t real,” a doctor said, “Because that means your optic nerve has detached.”

“Okay,” I said.

It was late when we got to the pharmacy and then to his house. He sat me on his bed and propped a bunch of pillows behind me. He undressed me.

It wasn’t smart to have sex, given that my eye might re-burst and yet at that moment we should have been in the tent, naked, beneath a pattering drizzle.

I held still and tried not to react.