Synesthesia

She lived in a city of grey.

It was the only colour that anyone ever really saw when they looked at those buildings. In the mornings when she looked out of her tiny two bedroom flat in the middle of town would see the looming monstrous city splayed out ahead of her, the grey creeping towards her, ready to swallow her. But she fought it valiantly. Her walls were painted obnoxiously bright with cheap paint, and her clothes were all dyed by hand so that they at least were saturated with colour. She kept huge vases of flowers in her tiny apartment, hand stitched curtains that hung heavy like Indian silks on her windows, and sometimes when the dun was right the room would fill with the colour from the curtain, bringing the room to life with a sun-kissed yellow.

But even though she lived in a city of grey, Phoebe Littleton saw colour everywhere, especially in words.

The city may be bleak but everywhere else she saw the beautiful rainbows expand, in bookstores she was sometimes overwhelmed with the colours that she saw. Whenever there had been a bad day at work Phoebe would seek refuge in the park with a stack of books that she had chosen with great difficulty from the bookstore.

Anybody else would have seen simple black print on beige paper. But she saw an explosion of colours, every word had it’s own shade; it’s own pop of magical colour. Words that were filled with anger were in shades of maroon and volcanic red. Jealousy was sea green; sadness a steel blue, hope was a joie de vivre shade of silver, depression a brown the colour of tree bark, happiness was a comfortingly clean white, sparkling with contentment.

But the most beautiful colour was love; it was the most wonderful shade of yellow, warm like daffodils and soft like butter. It was her favourite word to read, she could spend all day reading it, just looking at it. It was the word that she painted all over her walls. The beautiful soothing yellow stood out so wonderfully on the red walls that she had painted so many years before. It was the best word in the English language, the most beautiful to look at.

Her mother insisted that Phoebe went to the Doctor, and to appease her she went. The Doctor gave her a condition, but proposed no cure. He felt her happiness before he saw her face, the fact that she could see more colour in the world than anybody else was a gift that led to ultimate happiness. Her physical surroundings might be grey, but she saw it all through iris’s that were saturated with colour and a thirst for life.

Phoebe loved to keep her gift to herself, the sight of colours mad her happy and rather than sharing her gift, she shared her happiness. She would volunteer to read to kindergarteners, her joy at seeing the colours made the stories come alive for the small children who knew so little of the world. But there were others who thought they knew everything about the world, and they still never knew more than those small children. They didn’t understand the world but they understood colours and stories, for Phoebe it was enough for the moment.

She loved her life in her little colourful bubble, she would reach out to everyone but never let anybody else in. Phoebe never for one moment considered that in her colourful world she would feel lonely, until the day she met Aiden Richards. You only ever feel loneliness when you have spent time with other people, and have felt what it is like to spend time out of your world or share it with other people. Up until now other people had felt so alien to her, but he was special.

As special as she was.

He was the young music teacher at the school where she read her colourful stories, where she saw colours in words he saw them in music notes.

The two worlds combined together to make a whole, it was a world filled with warm yellow, brighter than sunshine and softer than silks. Words and music slotted together better than the pieces of a puzzle. The explosion of colours and happiness was great than anything that anybody could have ever imagined. There was never a shortage of feelings underlined and accentuated with every colour that was possible. They had their own soundtrack to their life, and created a new world for themselves.

At times Aiden and Phoebe saw different colours for different letters, notes or words, but the one colour that they always had in common was that of Phoebe’s favourite word.