If headlights bloom into starbursts on the drive home, there's an explanation.

I didn't keep a list of which streets still had lamps. I just started choosing them. Friends still suggest dinner at eight. I still say yes sometimes. I also keep three other reasons ready, and none of them is true.

Then the bloom started hanging. A car came the other way and the lane markers took a second to return. The second got longer. I started leaving earlier so I wouldn't have to explain why I wanted to be home before that unlit stretch.

Friends still suggest dinner at eight. I still say yes sometimes. I also keep three other reasons ready, and none of them is true. The true one is that after dark has become a hassle, and I'm tired of making excuses about a road I've driven for twenty years.

The coating was supposed to fix it. The yellow glasses were supposed to fix it. Each purchase felt grown-up and specific. Each one left the recovery time alone. That is the part I could not get anyone to talk about like it was a real subject.

I'm not diagnosing you. I don't know what's happening in your eyes. I know what I tried, in order, and I know the question that finally made the pattern make sense.

There's a loneliness to a problem you can only describe with a time of day. People understand 'I need new glasses.' They don't understand 'I won't take the dark stretch after eight.' So you stop describing it. You take the long way and arrive with a story about traffic.

I kept thinking the next pair would close it. That's how you spend two years on the same roads and still feel like a beginner after dark. It was never about the pair.

Here is what had already failed, in the order I tried them:

• A stronger prescription, twice
• Anti-glare coating, sold as the answer to headlights
• Yellow night-driving glasses from an ad
• Avoiding the highway after dark

None of those are silly. They are what a shop can sell you when the problem is supposed to live in the lens. Nobody offered a different question.

What if the glare isn't only an eye problem?

Figure · the barrier

There is a wall that is supposed to keep the back of the eye on its own. As the years go on, things from the rest of the body may wander over. I cannot prove that from here. It is the first picture that explained why the headlights hang and why the yellow glasses did nothing.

What people do with that picture is one capsule a day, with food. I wanted my optometrist to hear the question before I invented another reason to stay in.

If the hang after headlights is why you are still here, try it for sixty days and see.