Thursdays Are Red

Mondays are brown. Tuesdays are red. Wednesdays are blue. Thursdays are red. Fridays are yellow; Saturdays black. Sundays are gray, every time.

When I was young, I thought everyone thought in colors.

It was as clear as the magnetic alphabet soup on the fridge. Every letter, every number, every name and musical note in my head takes a color. Or a pattern. Or a texture. Sometimes all three.

Mondays are brown because Ms are brown, and Ns are brown, and Os are black, which means Monday is so frontloaded that the teal/blue D, red A, and yellow Y and S don't have a chance to break through the mud.

The first time I tried to explain this out loud to someone,

they asked if I'd ever had a concussion.

Some explanation, a blunt force trauma that may have crossed my wires,

turned all 9s yellow, all Gs orange,

every math problem a stained glass window.

Every poem, an aurora borealis.

*

The first time I found out there was a name for it, I saw it -

a shower of light, breaking through the loneliness.

They call it synesthesia.

(Synesthesia is yellow, because Ss are dominant yellow, and being the first letter gives it more power, and there are three of them in here. Ys and Is are also yellow, which means the brown N, black/red T, gray H, pink E and red A are swallowed by sunlight.)

It's a secret passage in the brain between colors and letters,

textures and flavors

patterns and music notes;

When I read, an entire rainbow blooms on the page.

 There are as many variations as there are people who see them.

My partner tastes music in my cooking; when he tells me

the sauce needs a baritone, something, maybe viola?

I reach for the cumin, brown sugar, tomato paste.

When he says

it's too high

I know I've added too much lemon,

use the gentle hum of olive oil to bring it down,

ground the chord.



My mother is a turquoise and copper desert with slivers of golden brown.

My father is black with a bold red stripe.

As I get older, I can feel myself darkening at the edges, hints of copper glinting in my waves.



I married blue - a royal navy

like the sky just past twilight,

and dotted with silver. I promised

to spend my life naming the constellations

only I could see in him; he promised me forever

on the soothing teal and deep purple sea he feels around him when I'm near.

Sometimes, when a song comes on the radio,

we'll ask each other what color are these sounds?

We don't always agree, but the overlaps are clear enough:

Rock-n-roll has a lot of silver-gray in it, and a woven texture.

Folk music is often a soft orange and shows up in strands, like guitar strings.

Pop songs punch between black and fluorescent yellow.

 No one knows who built the secret passages,

or why only some of us find our way into them, but

this language is an anchor, a different way to make sense

of the world.

I've never not trusted someone golden orange.

Bb major is the most triumphant key in music.

The word forsythia is the orange-pink-yellow of an epic sunrise,

but hope is a hippopotamus gray.

Thursdays are red, because I was loved most on Thursdays.

Threes are green, because it is the best age.

Mondays are brown, because the letters say so.

You have a color, and it is the most beautiful thing

my brain has ever made.

My brain is an artist.

I hear

in color.