IX: Synaesthesia | Silver-Tipped Swallow: "Come as You Are"
I’m twelve years old when I finally realise it isn’t normal. This is the first noon I can stomach, at school in some lunch table conversation with a girl who’s just transferred here: the cafeteria food’s usually okay, but on Mondays it’s super pointy. Blank stare, buzz of yellow like a dial tone beneath my skin. It’s super—what?
I put together the pieces then, but I don’t tell anyone until years or hours later. It feels like a party trick, & before I am anything else I am a teenage girl, convex in the wrong angles & trying desperately to fit in the space I’ve been assigned. I abhor being a spectacle, standing in a circle of tittering middle schoolers, what colour is my voice?
Two years later I start collecting diagnoses, & I forget about synaesthesia accordingly. The others are uglier, white-knuckled & seizing—depression, anxiety, OCD, hyperacusis. Mental illnesses, real ones, not first day of class everyone share a fun fact-worthy, not conversation starters or party tricks. You know there’s a theory that hyperacusis is actually a rare form of synaesthesia? I try not to think about it. The world is silent enough without pathologising song.
One in the afternoon, framed in the jagged centre of a fresh pandemic: I come home to full lockdown. Back in my childhood bedroom I’m confronted by pale blue walls, dolls I’ve had since five years old, my old gods dusty & asleep like balloons on the ceiling. In this room I spent the worst years of my life, I received the diagnoses that changed everything. I ran, drank down four oceans & made a new life in the world I found on the other side. But in the way of illness, the dance never really ends. I look over my shoulder once & I’m poised to circle back the damp, small & stranded in another variation on the same shotgun theme.
/
The news comes 2 P.M., sun guiltless & cough drop-red in the July sky. The lockdown order is being lifted, two weeks early. Accordingly, I spend as much time out of the house as possible.
C texts me at three, asks me out for drinks. It is good to see her face, & that’s not just nostalgia making music out of distance. Nonetheless, I’m wary. It’s been years since we dated, & it didn’t work the first time for a reason. But I check the time & realise we have been talking for seven hours straight, & all at once I remember the way it used to be, meaning, easy. Maybe this is what it takes, living in the house where I grew up, to remember it wasn’t always star-crossed, fate, you’re the only one for me. Or it’s not the house but July, the dead centre of the afternoon. Or it’s not this summer but the one before, barely 18 when she found me at a poetry reading & we figured each other out in our childhood bedrooms knowing we’d never speak again in two months, when everything felt song-struck & breathless & possible. Or, scratch that, it’s not song at all, nothing that obvious. It’s that all those years back, she never once asked me what colour her voice was.
/
4 P.M. & it’s odd, like a trick of the light, relearning her lifetimes after we parted last. That first summer I was so sick. Now we’re moored in a worldwide sickness with bodies wilting everywhere like roses in the heat, & I—wrong-dayed girl, hours spelled backwards in my hands—have never felt more alive. I’m not sure how she’ll take it, if she’ll understand me in this new key. I don’t taste honey, which I think is a good sign.
If memory is just a roomful of liars repeating back the same questions, I am more practised than I strictly should be at surrounding myself with people exactly like me. I date writers, musicians, crown my love in story, open my throat willingly to that indigo flood between autonomy & myth. C jokes that I think of her as another breed, a science person. Truthfully, I love spending time with her in large part because she sees the world so differently—not quite black & white, but certainly not the mess of sound & colour that I know. Everything’s complicated with me; nothing can ever be just one thing. Not her. She knows exactly where she came from, what she’s here to do. It lights me up or wakes me up, her stubborn certainty, unwavering conviction.
We are smart enough to avoid talking about love, but not enough to avoid talking about music. The clock strikes five & because it’s her, & because it’s me, the conversation turns to the playlists we made for each other that summer. I deleted yours years ago, I admit. I thought you kept every playlist you make, she teases. Usually, I say. But I got over you. I moved on. With anyone else it would feel like sacrilege to admit. With her the truth is enough. Me too, she says. But we found each other again.
Eyes open, looking down but not quite falling, not honey yet. My new playlist for her is called Take 2. Hers for me—Because we have finally outrun words.
/
It’s 6 P.M. on the subway when I ask where she’s taking me for dinner. Guess, she says, eyes dulcimer, sanctuary, & I don’t know if there’s a moment I’ve ever wanted more fiercely to be in love. I ask for a hint. We went there once, she says, & I must look confused because she clarifies, during Take 1. To hear her call it that, I ripple soundless into joy, can’t stop giggling, strangers on the train side-eying me, too glowing & wild to be set to any named music.
I guess every place I can think of. I’m the memory-keeper in our relationship, a fact I tease her about relentlessly; I bring up jokes from our first summer & watch her scramble to remember, beat of silence before she can place them in space. My body keeps everything. Part of it is mental illness—the obsessive-compulsive need for control, to tell a narrative that slouches exactly into place, makes sense in every retelling. But also, I don’t forget because I don’t know how. A flash of scarlet in my peripheral vision brings the scent of fried broccoli brings the first strains of Ella Fitzgerald from tinny speakers brings the throat-thick tang of too much wine & the blast of air-conditioning stepping into a taxi at twilight. A gift & a curse both, to have a sensory lineage that immediate, that intertwined. You say one word to me & it lives in my breath, memory of smell deformed into sound.
Ten minutes later I’ve exhausted the litany of dates I can remember from the last summer. She’s smug—clearly my memory of us isn’t as good as I’ve always bragged, or maybe it’s just selective. But I figure it out at seven on the doorstep. On our second date I brought her to my favourite independent bookstore & afterward, for dinner, we found our way to the restaurant right next door. It was a too-expensive affair with too-small portions; we sat upright in a fog of tuxedos & lipstick & hundred-dollar bottles of champagne, tennis-shoed teenage imposters, ordered the cheapest dishes on the menu & prayed our debit cards wouldn’t be declined, talked until the waiters shooed us out.
Now she guides me back to that same door. The one place you didn’t guess, she says, mischievous & lilting, for my ears only. She asks the waiter for the $10 appetizer we ordered the first time. When the food comes, she glances at me, grins, you look happy. It stuns me, just then, that she says it as though it’s what she’s been hoping for all this time. Like my joy isn’t an inconvenience, static instead of song—that she can hear me for what I am, hold me right here, open mouth & improvisation & all.
/
It happens suddenly, as these things do. A sensory overload episode turned panic attack, me trembling in the bathroom of our neighbourhood bar, resurfacing to an 8 P.M. circle of worried friends, pulling her aside & stiffly informing her that I need to go home. C doesn’t ask questions, just puts me in a cab. The whole drive back I listen to her playlist, Flatsound repeating IexistIexistIexistIexistIexist, & in the space of the song I do, I do, the driver’s gaze boring me down in the rearview mirror, loud & inaudible at once, I exist.
I text her the next day, pastel green passing around me like a lacquer, daring me into stillness. I apologise for ruining the night. She says, don’t. I’m glad you’re okay.
Reading that text feels like jazz or hope, nine in the evening with honey congealing into chords in the air. It’s not that I believe illness makes me unlovable—I know by now how to wear all my little catastrophes with pride. It’s more that there isn’t a good song for the way I move through the world. Disabled girls don’t get to be princesses. If you sweep me off my feet I get nauseous & lightheaded, I need to take my medications & drink a glass of water. That’s not particularly romantic.
That night she adds Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” to my playlist: come as you are, as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend, as a friend / as an old enemy. When the honey rises, I let it. I’m nobody’s fool, but I’m also leaving soon, & summer is low-ceilinged & fading out & knows me better than all my favourite songs. It’s easier this way, to call it a colour instead of a feeling. Look—the words are all wrong, but I came back to this place to choose something. If its name is love, I can live with that. I can let it understand.
/
Too soon it’s August, meaning ten at night. I can tell she misses me, stretching future absence into present tense, but she never says it aloud. Instead we walk along the river & listen to music in shared earphones, add to each other’s playlists, pull each other into impromptu dances at bars. She tells me she loves me for the first time after Rusty Clanton tells me the night before.
On our final night we book a five-star hotel, 11 P.M., another echo of our last summer. (The first time it was a bug-ridden, cash-only motel. When I see the new room with its floor-to-ceiling windows & stone façade, C reads my face before I can make the joke, & we’re laughing together without words, & of course, of course, this is how it is.)
She has a gift for me, she tells me, fuchsia echoes triangulating the air around her. Something to remember me by. I open it as the clock strikes midnight & it takes me a moment to understand. I dropped her wristwatch on concrete on the last night of Take 1. She kept it, all these years, hours, summers, a thousand songs later stuck in the same spot, hands forever frozen at the point we parted last. It felt fitting, she says.
There is a feeling that has no colour except come as you are, a feeling like honey or fried broccoli. A body in motion is just as likely to be falling in love as running for its life. With my suitcases packed & the sky creased to its perfect middle, I’m the most beautiful I’ve ever been without having already left. & maybe sometimes it can be simple. I don’t have to know what to call it, I just have to remember to take my meds. I don’t have to be what I used to be, stopped watch, right exactly twice. Don’t sweep me off my feet. Just let me tease you about your music taste, the posters on the walls of your childhood bedroom. None of this has to be a map, & we aren’t intruders to the song that chose us first. The answer to the question you never asked is burnt orange when you’re talking but dark purple when you’re singing, off-key in a bar, when your voice catches the light—slow down, shut up about illness or memory, enough with time, just turn off the music & touch me.
(Silver-Tipped Swallow is a column by Topaz Winters about the ways in which music intertwines with our experiences in loving, losing, and lingering on what remains. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia. It is available for preorder now.)