sudden death sudden blindness

Eric experienced two and a half drastic life changes following the sudden death of his best friend Devin. Devin and Eric had been best friends since they were young boys, living together both throughout college and then in city apartments, the kind with fire escapes, through most of their twenties. In what was the 33rd year of life for both of them, Devin died in a freak boating accident. The results upon Eric's life were as follows:

ONE.
Eric developed an intense paranoia of becoming suddenly blind. He began having a reoccurring nightmare about sudden blindness every night, waking up in a cold sweat at the point in the dream when his nightmare persona entered complete and total darkness and the scene went black.

ONE AND A HALF.
Accompanying this paranoia was a phobia of blind people. After Devin's death, whenever he saw a blind person (and there were a lot of blind people in San Francisco), Eric became rigid with fear and could only imagine the person stepping off a curb and getting instantly flattened by oncoming traffic, a bus or a truck, something heavy and ruthless.

TWO AND A HALF.
Three weeks after the funeral, Eric left his wife of 4 years. It happened after he passed an alter of owl figures displayed in a random window across from Mission Dolores, which prompted Eric to remember a dream that he had just before himself and Devin moved out of their last apartment together to live with their respective fiances.

In the dream, Eric and Devin and a large owl sat at the kitchen table of their apartment. Devin opened his mouth to speak but instead of words his mouth hung open in silence and his tongue rolled out of his mouth and on to the floor. It must have hung six or seven feet long, stretching across the linoleum floor. Eric proceeded to roll up Devin's tongue and then, before returning the tongue to Devin's mouth, decided to place it in his own - just for a second, just to see. It was thick and juicy like a steak. In the dream Eric was vividly and positively certain that his friends' tongue was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. After taking the tongue out of his own mouth and placing it back in Devin's, the owl at the kitchen table spoke, telling Eric: "from this moment on, your taste buds will gradually deteriorate. nothing will ever taste as good as it just did. your vision, too, will deteriorate, and the colors will slowly but surely wash away, until there is nothing left but darkness."