To dazzle in five sentences

Five sentences inspired by a challenge over at Lillie McFerrin Writes. I gave myself a 30 minute time limit at which point I had to just let it be what it was.

The prompt was: dazzles.
This is the result.


Was it inevitable that hearing a thing often enough would make it true?  They'd told him so often to not have unreasonable hope, to lower his expectations, and he wondered if their own doubt was strong enough to ruin the admittedly slender chance he had. He'd lain in this hospital bed for what might have been a lifetime; his fingertips had memorized every tuck and fold of the bandages and he spent his days remembering what the light looked like that he now could only feel warming his face.

At last, fingers other than his own moved softly over the wrappings and he could feel the gauze loosening from over his ears and across his eyes; every sound in the room hushed, receding from his awareness as his eyelids flickered open for the first time in nearly a year. At first he feared they had been quite right, that the procedure to restore his sight hadn't worked; but then, exultant and grateful, he realized the dazzling striations he was seeing were not the result of diminishing vision he had become so used to, but rather bursts of sunlight shining through the lingering raindrops on the window, glittering and dancing, bringing tears to his eyes with its welcome brightness.