Light-Constructed-Feeling

I am a synaesthete.

I can tell you that the Beatles are red and brown. To me a fence will always be green and blue even if it is a splintered knotted panel, webbed with lichen.

The days of the week are voice-noted, I’m walking, slightly out of breath, but I speak clearly because Wednesday is dark green and Thursday is obviously its pastel cousin. I’m hyper-aware that broccoli and spearmint share verdant speckles so they must be the same.

I am a synaesthete. And I’m connected to everything. On a chair with tubes and monitors, beeping loudly and saturated. Chemicals pulsate in the greyest matter and everything I can see is just energy, spread brashly on walls and turf.

Why is it that I know that Livin’ on a Prayer tastes like strawberry ice-cream? I have asked myself that question many times but it remains, like tax and death, a certainty of my life.

I am definitely a synaesthete, because I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of this if that wasn’t the case. It’s a colourful sonar that connects things instead of locating them. I like bats - they get it don’t they? Hearing second-hand reflected sound to hunt their prey? I’ve always admired their attitude.

All thoughts and minds and retinas are synthetic, they’re related videos on YouTube playlists that mill and flit around the place, under oceans. Digital is everywhere, with its LEDs and micro-node mosaics that smooth off into pictures and films. Tiny electrical signals flash into collages of movement, twisting pixels, shadows and landscapes into a grain of reality. If you stare at static long enough, it glitches into colour, into nacreous hail stones bouncing across the vacant screen. Sometimes I see flocks of birds circling.

Quasars at the very edge of the known universe blast energies the length of our solar system from their extremities. The light appears red because it is moving away from us and this make sense because quasar is one of the reddest words I know. My thoughts are synthetic and that is okay.

It is okay because I am definitely a syaesthete. I am connected like worlds are connected. Some connections have connections to other connections in ways you might not know. How the smell of rain on thick new leaves is endorphins and also photosynthesis, I am a photosynaesthete. Light-constructed-feeling. Because in the dark there is mainly cold and stillness, fewer memories.

Dark and black are different. Dark is nothingness, void. December is black, with purple furnishings. I’m not sure how this works because a lot can happen in a month. Contrasting palettes within colours? I think time has a colour but I’m not sure which one it is yet. If I were to guess I would go with either severed electrical wires or bismuth. And I think everyone will agree when I say that bismuth does not look like it should be called bismuth at all.

But vibrant things stay with me, stick to the backs of my eyes like surgical tape. I am a synaesthete, connected like the world is and has been connected, how the Amazon and Nubian desert are linked inextricably. Dust winds surge across the Atlantic to fertilise the Amazon’s peculiarly infertile soil. This is yellow and silver to me.

The world is a synaethete. Like ocean phytoplankton as ochre lights in a dark city, synaesthesia connects to the mainframe, to the whirring hum of generators and transistors thatched into concrete. The plankton keeps the atmosphere balanced, blue and occasionally black, it keeps us stitched, linked, cultivated.

I am a synaethete, delicate. And so is my world.