Synthesia
by: startscribbling12
He looked at me like I was the sun. Of course, when he first told me this, I thought it was some cheesy line. It was something that people said to describe their feelings for someone else. It was something that I didn't initially understand. I've looked at the sun. It's pretty painful. He told me I wasn't the color of the sun exactly, but a pale yellow. I didn't understand what he meant, and I wanted to write him off as a little crazy. Sound didn't have colors associated with them like that. It was impossible.
But it wasn't impossible. He explained to me later that he had Synthesia; he could see color in sound. Whenever I spoke, pale yellow was what he saw. He became quite taken with the color that I gave out. I had my own special mug at his place that was pale yellow in color. His was red and his roommate had a gray one. Much of the things at that apartment was color coded by the colors he saw in our voices. My tooth brush was a pale yellow, as were my slippers, spare blanket, and even the hook that I hung my personal house keys on. It was how he organized and coped with his life and I just went along with it as if color coding my life was normal.
I once asked him how he dealt with it. We lived in the city. There was noise at every hour of every day. No escape from it. It must be blinding. When I asked this question, his eyes crinkled in the way that they normally did and he smiled at me in the way that doesn't reach his eyes. White noise is what he told me. He learned to block it out. I knew this was a lie.
I'd catch him staring at me in a weird way, especially whenever I was talking a lot. I didn't talk often. I was quiet by nature. But he managed to get me to talk about my day or my feelings more often than not. Sometimes I thought that he wasn't even listening to me, but he was always able to reiterate what I said. Eventually, I asked him why he looked at me that way. I knew he saw colors in every sound, so why was I different? When he smiled at me this time, his eyes still crinkling in the way they did, I could tell the smile was real. The pale yellow was unique. He had never met anyone else with this color and whenever I spoke, it was such a relief. Like the eye of a storm.
I began to love myself more after that, and in turn, I was able to love him as well. I don't know if his love for me was because of me or because of my color, but I didn't care. I made him happy. I helped make the noisy and sensory over-loading world more bearable for him.
When he died, an accident to most but I knew that it was intentional, I rid my closet of any clothes of the pale yellow color. I would not allow anyone to see me the way he saw me, with the color that almost saved his life, the color that was almost but not good enough.
Hey! This is a short little drabble I actually wrote for my creative writing class! It's heavily inspired by Zankyou no Terror, so I thought I would post it on here! Let me know what you think. I apologize for any grammatical errors. I wrote this during another class.