The Colors of Life

The Colors of Life

I was sixteen when I found out. The year was 1968. My father and I were in the kitchen, he, in his usual talk-spot by the pantry door, my sixteen year-old self in a chair by the window. The two of us were reminiscing about the time I was a little girl, learning to write the letters of the alphabet. We remembered that, under his guidance, I'd learned to write all of the letters very quickly except for the letter 'R'.

"Until one day," I said to my father, "I realized that to make an 'R' all I had to do was first write a 'P' and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line."

"Yellow letter? Orange Letter?" my father said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you know," I said. "'P' is a yellow letter, but 'R' is an orange letter. You know - the colors of the letters."

"The colors of the letters?" my father said.

It had never come up in any conversation before. I had never thought to mention it to anyone. For as long as I could remember, each letter of the alphabet had a different color. Each word had a different color too (generally, the same color as the first letter) and so did each number. The colors of letters, words and numbers were as intrinsic a part of them as their shapes, and like the shapes, the colors never changed. They appeared automatically whenever I saw or thought about letters or words, and I couldn't alter them.

I had taken it for granted that the whole world shared these perceptions with me, so my father's perplexed reaction was totally unexpected. From my point of view, I felt as if I'd made a statement as ordinary as "apples are red" and "leaves are green" and had elicited a thoroughly bewildered response. I didn't know then that seeing such things as yellow P's and orange R's, or green B's, purple 5's, brown Mondays and turquoise Thursdays was unique to the one in two thousand persons like myself who were hosts to a quirky neurological phenomenon called synesthesia. Later in my life, I would read about neuroscientists at NIH and Yale University working to understand the phenomenon.