The Colors of My Letters and Numbers are Flyer than Yours

So, today I found a name for the condition that has plagued me all my life.

Perhaps "plagued" is not the best word, for the condition hasn't been unpleasant, itchy or putrid or anything like that. I've never needed a cream or liniment for it, and it is pretty much unseen by the public eye. For all intents and purposes, unless you really, really know me, you probably never even knew that I had the "condition".

It's called synesthesia.

I was listening to NPR tonight while washing dishes after a nutritious dinner of curried quinoa, collard and kale greens and salmon cakes when this segment of Soundprint came on. Seemingly otherwise normal people were talking about how they literally see the colors of numbers, letters and words. For some, there are even smells and textures associated with them, too.

All my life, I've seen my numbers and letters and words in colors. For example, the number three is always, always a deep navy blue. The word three, however is a mixture of colors, starting with a black t, and then slowly lightening from black to deep purple to blue to light blue.....

The number 1999 is yellow - bright, blinding, neon yellow. But the number 2000 is a very vivid red. However, the number 1 is not yellow, but a lime'ish green. The number 2 is red, but the zeros have no color.

My favorite words have colors, too - and sometimes textures, smells and animations. The word cacophony is a series of patterned letters - stripes, polka dots, checkers, herringbones, all stuck together with no clear logic, blinking individually -rhythmless and indistinct from its neighbor.

Pessimistic is slimy green, oozing from the double-s's and smelling badly.

Caustic is like an oil spill. In a sentence it sits above the other letters, undulating as if on an ocean, creating swirly rainbows on its surface.

Sychophant is red - actually crimson. It has the texture of the peel-able wax pencils that elementary school teachers used to check papers. It is equally indelible.

You can imagine that reading for me is a multi-sensory experience. It's not just the act of stringing letters together to make words to make sentences that make paragraphs, that weave chapters into stories. For me, reading is a seriously tactile act. Some authors are able to make word combinations that cause actual physical reactions in me. I remember the first time I read Song of Solomon and got so moved upon reading about Pilates lack of a navel that I had to put the book down and walk away. Reading that passage caused my body to flush from my hair follicles down to the pit of my abdomen.

Other writers, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (if you don't know her, this is your chance to google her and buy a book) are able to make words tell tragic tales with a level of humor and everydayness that is both heartbreaking and completely hilarious just by the combinations of words she uses.

I am currently reading Inside Inside by James Lipton. For the past few days, I've been trying to figure out why it's taking me so long to get through the book. Today I realized why. The words that he uses are so dense and strung together so tightly that they don't flow. The colors don't match and meld together properly in my mind. It's like eating a meal that gives really, really bad heartburn.

I get the same reaction to accents. Some accents sound like broken glass being poured slowly onto a tile floor in the middle of a quiet museum. Other accents sound like the clanging of cowbells. Still other sound like the tuning of an orchestra before a concert....it's just that the concert never gets started and it just sounds like the endless tuning of various instruments.

So, I am not crazy - just different (which is yellow-green like a forsythia plant). And different is okay, I guess, even though neither green nor yellow are favorite colors of mine!