Synesthesia Confessions
By Lilly Etea
I want you to see me as a whole person. I go to school and I take classes and they take up a lot of time when I do them right. I like doing them right. Some are easy and make me feel smart, and some are hard and confusing and make me feel small. I study architecture because it is brown and orange and feels like old plush carpet against the pads of your bare foot. So does October. Architecture is best in October.
I have sex sometimes and it’s silver and feels like the number 6, but I also get colds sometimes and watch Netflix in my pajamas. I go to parks to see senses and poetry mixing together, and I go running because it’s a white creamy puddle with bright red flakes floating on top. I also run when I feel fat or when I think it’s going to rain, because rain feels like Willie Nelson and the world through blue-gray sunglasses that smell like velvet and sore hamstrings. I like running best in December and January, because those months are blue-gray too, and it’s nice when things match. Running should match the months, so December and January it is.
I like Thai food real spicy, and I drink my coffee black and bourbon straight. I think it’s because tastes are RICH like the number 17, and sharp tastes feel like ice cold water in a dark cave and stepping on a sharp rock, and then laying in a clean sleeping bag with freshly shaved legs, and falling asleep in knit socks.
I have favorite songs that taste like hot, oozing lasagna, and I want to be a poet, but I also want to be a teacher, and a mathematician, and an engineer, and someone else’s lasagna, someday. I’d like to be someone’s Van Morrison or Talking Heads or Bird in Space, or that feeling I get when I’m lost in a pad of paper and an old box of colored pencils, and colors are more important than Rousseau’s Emile or eigenvalues in linear algebra. Colors are number 7. Drawing feels like corduroy.
I want you to know that fresh fruit tastes like secular love, and roasted vegetables with black pepper taste like family and dairy tastes like exhaustion. Seafood tastes like families that aren’t mine, but scallops taste like long simple kisses. I want you to understand that rice tastes like no one, so I don’t eat it.
I want you to see me as someone who eats and sees and needs sleep and exercise — just like you! I want you to sit on the porch swing inside my head and just be my lasagna for a little while. We can wear sweaters. Porch swings are light purple.