They were my glasses from college. For some reason - call it flamboyance or idiocy - I got them in frames of red gel, like Sally Jesse Raphael - and the prescription was possibly three years out of date. Underneath the right frame, the side of my face was swollen like an egg was lodged just a centimeter or so below the skin. My eye was bruised to a bizarre rainbow of black, blue, purple, red and yellow, like a piece of rotten meat attached to my skull. My lower lip was split enough that it hurt to smile. I had this perpetual headache on the left side of my brain. People avoided me on the street. I was a mess. But the glasses? They were the insult to my injurious face.