The Sound of Color

Crimson screams. Violent scarlet sirens that leave me blinking blindly, shaking my head to collapse the eruption of sound and color. Sound and color, color and sound. Is there a difference? Melancholy blue lockers. I want to drown in their soft drizzle; let their rush wash me away in the streaming hallway. Wash me away from the squat wrestler in full Rainier High red regalia, scowling at me in confusion from under a shock of purple hair.

Another bell rings, this one everyone can hear. It throws a line out into the hall. The boy bites. English class reels him into her open words. I let the flow of the thinning crowd carry me to the less forgiving math.

Sound and color, color and sound. There is no difference. It wasn’t always like this. I slide down into my chuckling sherry chair, tapping my temples. Remembering a time when I conducted the sunrise blush; when colors sang for me like a music box, easily tuned out. Silence is a word I’ve never known and never wish to. I dreamed a silence once. It was a hollow rushing fall. When I woke I poked my damp head into the night air to be comforted by her cool caress. I am the sky’s confidant. She whispers to me alone in angry cobalt cacophonies and satisfied cerulean sighs.

Sound and color, color and sound. The two are entwined in my mind. Most people feel the calming effects of blue, scientists say, or the energy of green. I love the hyper buzz of Saint Patrick’s day, but you can only imagine how I hate the saccharine Valentine. Pink itches. In the classroom colors clamor to be heard everywhere, from a band of crayons to the yellow birdsong out the window. At the school library I’ve read articles where lofty scholars pass it off as something called Synesthesia. Jumbled senses, they say, a condition (gift, or curse?) where tastes can be perceived as shapes; or in my case, sound as color. They just like labels. All I know is that I’m alone.

I force my distracted mind back to the board. Fifteen minutes, the clock drips, each second a raindrop on my head. Chinese water torture. Numbers are lucky; they always know where they stand. When ab few question why. We were friends when I was little. I gave them all personalities like Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and they lived peacefully in a tower of addition until middle school algebra brought it down.
6 was a pregnant mother.
8 a curved kindergarten teacher.
9 an arrogant athlete, and
0 a tagalong. I sketch the numbers on my notebook, smiling slightly, and think about the wrestler in the hall. I hope he’s new. The look he gave me had none of the contempt I get from these people I’ve known since preschool.

The bell rings again in low tones of yellow, mellow. Conversation rises like blue jazz. I scribble down my homework and pack up, scooting out the door before anyone else to the spot I ran into that kid. I liked how he felt, an honest purple twanging with serious gray undertones. Dark wine flowing into a crystal glass. I study the faded shadow of my figure in the locker. Thin freckled nose and wide glass green eyes, chattering ginger hair that falls to a delicately drawn jaw. I catch sight of a sturdy plum figure behind me and blush strawberry, pretending to open a locker. Wine. Everything quiets. Who knew silence could be so deafening?

He has a teasing smile—pink, but pleasant. My stomach fills with liquid ice. Is he laughing at me?

“Why are you opening my locker?” he asks.

His locker? I’m horrified. “I—oh, uh… have the wrong—”

“I have your book here, y’know. You dropped it before?” He tugs a slender book out of his crimson jacket. It doesn’t feel like a sharp siren anymore, but a muted flute. Then nothing. He holds the book out to me, watching me closely. “A Mango Shaped Space? What are you, synesthete?” he jokes. I freeze, surprised. His smile widens in conviction. “Gonna take it or what?”

I return his smile weakly and take the book. Sound rushes back in perfect harmony, streaming around us.

Cerulean water, seawater, river water, holy water, wrap this child in mercy, heal her, heaven’s only daughter...

They say silence is golden, but don’t listen to them.
Silence is a wash of violet and silver, like the dying sunrise.
Together we’re a duet.

---

We had to write a paper/short story/poem for health class about a disease or condition. Amid tear-jerking cancer tragedies and gory accounts of E. Boli was this.

Synesthesia
"Does your favorite book smell like textured circles? Do you think you are the same age as the cerulean blue, steadfast, brotherly, male number 4? Do you dislike the personality of your bedroom’s doorframe? Do you see white when you stub your toe? Does the odor of road tar taste salty? Does Sting's voice look like golden spheres?
If so, you are almost certainly a synesthete. (Most people are!) Synesthesia literally refers to the fact that in some animals, a stimulus in one sense modality involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another sense modality. An example of this would be the taste of lemon visually evoking the color blue. The elicited synesthetic experience does not replace the normal experience but instead always adds to it. Synesthetic elicitations are durable, consistent, and discrete, as noted by Dr. Cytowic."
--Mixed Signals

Italicized lyrics at the end © Paul Simon, Spirit Voices