Synesthesia: A Memoir

By Ellen Cohen

WELCOME TO THETECHNICOLOR WORLD OF SYNESTHESIA.

This fictionalized memoir takes place in quaint northern California wine country in the 1980s as well as present day Philadelphia. It is both a coming of age story as well as a chronological view of my personal discovery of four kinds of synesthe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822903319

Ellen Cohen

ELLEN ADAIR COHEN is a writer, synesthete and four time marathoner. She received her B.A. in French from Temple University and taught ESL in China from 2012-2015. She worked for the City of Philadelphia: Independence Branch of the Free Library. Synesthesia: A Memoir is her first book.

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Charleston, SC

www.PalmettoPublishing.com

Synesthesia: A Memoir

Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Cohen

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023915957

All rights reserved

No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means–electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other–except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without prior permission of the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-8229-0330-2

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-8229-0332-6

eBook ISBN: 979-8-8229-0331-9

For anyone who has asked, "What do you think about while

you’re modeling?"

Foreword

For the poets it’s "a rose is a rose is a

rose is a rose,"¹

and for the dancers it’s "a pirouette is a

pirouette is a pirouette is a pirouette."

For the painters it’s "a van Gogh is a van

Gogh is a van Gogh is a van Gogh."

But for the insecure writer, you must

believe against all odds—to the point of

idiocy—that your work is a van Gogh,

your words are the rose, and you are

painting stars that are pirouetting

proudly across the page where you will

them. They should be honored, those

precious few stars to be counted among

those in your skyscape.

The stars will never betray you, and they

will not let you down.

There is only this comforting thought

and the try.

¹ Rose is… was written as part of Gertrude Stein’s 1913 poem Sacred Emily.

Table of Contents

Lola

Crush

The Bicycle

Fourth Grade

Burning Down the House

Divorce

Strawberries

Ivy’s House

Clan of the Cave Bear

Evergreen Lofts

The Moving Fight

Camping

Fuchsia

Photography

Freshmen

Fiancé

Temple

Paris

Sister of the Bride

The Bones of Being Twenty

Arturo

Clubbing

Indian

Recovery

Loquita

The Accident

Digby

Second Chances

Running

Modeling

The Other Synesthetes

Fibonacci

Barbie

Sculpture Competition

Painting

Barbie II

Reading

Lucid Dreaming

New Age

Modeling II

Personality

Corel Painter

KenKen Puzzles

Genius

Aphantasia

The Disco Ball

Gematria

Lolita

Calculus

π

String Theory

The Synesthesia Battery

Favorite Person

Out-Takes

Related Literature

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Lola

People always ask what my first memory is. It’s a pretty common getting to know you question when you’re trying to break the ice. I always used to lie because I remember my magenta-colored birth, and that seems impossible. Instead, I would describe a moment when I was two years old. We lived in a motor home park on a tiny tract of land. We had a front yard with two trees and a closet-sized backyard. I would go down three steps and walk to the back, pick raspberries off a bush, and put them on my fingers before I ate them. A four-raspberry morning. Or I would tell the story of my sister Lola’s birth. When I was exactly two and a half, my mother went into labor while we were in the car driving over Mount Saint Helena. It was that switchback stretch of road that triggered a fear-based response, causing her water to burst. It was raining heavily, and she was in the front passenger seat, and we ended up in the Santa Rosa hospital. My father drove a calm forty miles per hour there with me silently riding in the back seat.

I know it’s a real memory because I’ve asked my father why he was watching TV in the hospital hallway while mom was pushing out the baby. He responded, Oh yeah, that was actually a cool nature show.

But I was running back and forth in the tiled hallway, and we couldn’t both go in to see her yet, so we waited. They used a little suction device to help my sister make her great escape, and immediately afterward we went inside. A profound hush came upon me as I realized that that moment would be special forever. I would have to say the right thing, even though I was just two and a half. I walked straight up to the bed and took one look at her, said, She’s so beautiful! and leaned forward and kissed her. My parents were dead silent but separately grinning like actors in a movie scene. Then I took my eyes off her and stepped back a bit. In reality my sister was a hugely pinkish amaranth, like a bright Native American sweet potato with a shock of hair and tiny balled-up fists. But I was proud that I had said the right thing.

Remembering Lola’s birth reminds me that I can remember what happened leading up to it. My mom was pregnant and home alone with me while my father was at work selling eyeglasses. Being pregnant, she needed to walk every day. She would walk to five different neighbors’ homes in the mobile home park. I would run in circles quietly inside while she chatted with these ladies. I spoke minimally and never really had to engage. But I remember that as the due date got closer, the talk was about the new baby. I got told over and again, You’re going to be an older sister! What do you think about that?

I was a child of few words. My speechlessness was a constant disappointment. Looking back, over the course of whole days, I think I probably spoke fewer than ten words—just enough to make everyone happy and not concern my parents. In truth my earliest memory is being in the womb. I know it sounds all romanticized and preposterous, but I can assure you it isn’t. I was due at the end of May, but I was born more than two weeks late. I remember feeling warm and nourished. I came out only when I had to, on my father’s birthday. He must have put his hand on my mother’s belly the night before or massaged her back or made a joke. My mother laughed; she relaxed. The water broke. My bubble of normalcy shattered. I was terrified. They got in the car, and my father drove over the mountain to the closest hospital in Ukiah. By the time they got there and into a room, it was the middle of the night. I was born at 1:11:11 a.m. exactly. The nurse and the doctor gazed into my eyes, which were large and open. In fact, every part of me was large. I was a ten-pound baby. Word spread like wildfire through the hospital that a newborn was eye-tracking already. In droves all the other staff on duty stopped in to wiggle their fingers at me. Finally, after enough of this attention, my mom coughed and asked to hold her baby. They brought me back into her. My dad said, I thought we agreed we were naming her Amy? My mother replied, She can’t be Amy; let’s name her Ellen instead. By that time, it was 3:00 a.m. My father said, Sure, dear. I became Ellen. My father drove us all home later, on June 10. For the rest of my life, I would joke about being his birthday gift.

Crush

My childhood love was Young Vegan, but everyone called him Ivy. Unfortunately, he wasn’t my neighbor, so I didn’t often see him, and an aura of mystique surrounded him. Kids were a rarity on my street. To invite other kids over to play or go swimming with us in our pool, I had to speed walk a mile to invite and escort them over. My family owned the only pool for miles, and I was cognizant of what that luxury represented. But I was six years old. My crush wasn’t serious or important, and Ivy never came swimming. I’m not sure at what exact point this kid turned up in my life.

One minute, in third grade, I was spinning upside down on metal bars, and he was nowhere to be found. The next minute, in fourth grade, there he was: on the quad asphalt, being whimsical with basketballs by himself.

His name was tangibly harmonious. It didn’t rhyme, but to me his entire name happened to be a resplendent blue-and-brown color. It came with a good feeling as well, but back then I didn’t know I had a rare condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia.

Ivy was easily spotted from a distance. He was a redhead. When he was happy, he looked quite happy, radiant, as if you could drown in his joy. At some point I realized I was staring. Worse, my best friend Alicia noticed I was staring and started teasing me.

You like him. She poked me in the ribs hard, surprising me with her malice. I needed to save face.

No, I don’t! My face erupted a huge grin of defiance, betraying me.

Prove it! Alicia said with her hand on her hip, dribbling a basketball expertly during recess.

Come on—let’s go beat him up. I was trying to divert attention from the teasing I felt imminently pending. I could not take my eyes off this kid.

We screamed and ran off in no particular direction through a sea of kids, balls, and jump ropes.

In retrospect, I feel bad for the guy. It must have looked preposterous from the appropriate adult vantage point. Two girls chased some kid onto the soccer pitch and beat him up, dragging him through the grass just because he was a ginger head. It was two against one; it surely wasn’t a fair fight. Luckily the bell rang, saving him as we all sprinted back to our homeroom from the field. That was the first and last time I ever bullied anyone.

Additional extra emotional moments came during elementary school when I was staring empathetically at an adult pushing a kid in a wheelchair. There were at least a dozen kids who had cerebral palsy and were in various states of accommodation. At some point while not playing with others, I got roped into holding doors open. Eventually that job turned into pushing one of the students’ nonelectric chairs.

The sidewalk at this makeshift school wasn’t much better than any other inner-city sidewalk. Somehow, in the first hour of the first day of pushing Stan, as I was following the person in front of me, the chair wheel caught in the gap of the sidewalk. The whole chair swung forward, and it was too heavy. Stan couldn’t put his hands up to protect himself, and this crash drew blood. But it was an accident. Poor Stan, who was already injured, got his head smashed because of me. I’ve never forgotten it since. The slight cut. The overturned chair. I tried righting it, but it was literally two hundred pounds. The guilt washed over me. I muttered a confession to my mom, and she wasn’t too concerned because no phone call followed. Or I hid the fact and never told anyone what I’d done. The blond helper ladies in charge wanted to know whether I would still push his chair the following day. I said no and stood there awkwardly. I would have said hell no! if I had been old enough to.

I never pushed a wheelchair again until I was an adult because of the trauma and the guilt. Overall mine was an untraumatic childhood—for an average person, if I had been average. But I was allergic to noise. Not just the squeaking of chalk on the blackboard or the sound of running feet on asphalt or yelling and screaming during recess. I visualized all noise. A little white line here, a splash of licorice there. A dark slam. A sweetgrass violin sound or a brown key of G during the Pledge of Allegiance recited in the morning. During these days, my field of vision had a lot to process, and I was never bored. But I began to harbor a love and hate of any sound that got repeated. I began to hate words if they were the same word, I had already heard a thousand times. I needed a routine, but I also needed silence to not have a bad day. I also needed to break free from the finiteness of my childhood life. Even in the most well-behaved class, I could look at my paper or the blackboard only for so long before the sentence I was thinking in my head obliterated what I was trying to read. If there was talking next to me, the effect was even worse. There were my thoughts, the teacher’s words, and my paper to read, all filling the same horizon line of the air in front of me. I was moving through school with spaghetti strings constantly thrung into my face, being trained to ignore them. It was about 1987, and A Mango-Shaped Space² by Wendy Mass and other books on synesthesia, especially for children, didn’t exist yet. I didn’t know that other kids didn’t read words in the air, that it was just me, and I really wish I had told someone.

² I highly recommend this book.

The Bicycle

My parents subscribed to the club of keeping up with the Joneses. On my father’s optometrist salary, they moved out of the tiny-home trailer park and away from the stoplight of Highway 111 to a farmer’s homestead. There on Silver Stone Drive, we grew a little older and slightly mature, until one frozen winter, my sister and I were big enough to merit the purchase of two matching bicycles.

My problem with the bicycles was that they were totally indistinguishable from one another. Just imagine a nineties garish woman’s jacket with splotches from a paintball attack and transpose it onto a bicycle. I couldn’t bear to look at the colors on the bike. Neither did I reach for my dad’s bike to try to ride it because his was Beatles Yellow Submarine mustard yellow. Realizing the need to overcome my aversion, I asked Chief to put duct tape on Lola’s frame. When he obliged, I was very confused about why the yellow splotches on the bike bothered me and stung so much, though I was determined to not complain about the sour taste and bad feeling. We were meant to grow into these. It took only one visit from a five-year-old neighbor girl—a girl who proudly declared she was capable of riding a bike without any training wheels and hopped right on to prove it—to cause me anguish. My stomach flipped, and my face turned red in embarrassment. A dragon in the vicinity of my chest roared.

The next day after the five-year-old blond cherub child had ridden my new bicycle and made it look easy, I understood that I would have to teach myself to ride on that ugly bike. There seemed to be no other way around it. Here is what Sassy has to say about the whole affair: You came home every day that week, put down your backpack on a chair, and told me, ‘I have to go ride my bike.’ You went out to the garage, unlocked it, and got your bike out, and you did that every day for about two weeks until you could ride it.

What my mother’s rendition fails to convey is the utter terror, anger, and self-flagellation coursing through me as I attempted to push off on our gravel driveway. It was logistically impractical. I feared falling on the asphalt, where there were cars. I’d already done a full face-plant in the street on my roller skates, which I had no intention of duplicating. Alternatively, I opted for learning to ride a few pedal strokes at a time in the coarse gravel that wasn’t too deep. That would have to suffice.

As I pushed off and kept trying to use one of my feet to catch me from falling before, I had any momentum, I began praying for my nascent life; certain imminent death was the next bend in the circular driveway. Words like You’re bad at this cropped up in my vision, making my job harder. I’m uncertain why I had to go it alone except that another person would have meant double the noise, double the words. I had my friend Alicia, who would have gladly demonstrated how to bike forward, with no hands, and push off correctly. But the terror of losing face, of knowing out there was a younger person happily pedaling around, was excruciating enough to cause me sleep loss and unquantifiable heaps of stress. The story ended happily. No lives were lost. Only one scraped knee was created.

Dad! Daddy’s home! I learned to ride my bike today! I can ride it—want to see??

Okay, let me go get the tool to take the training wheels off.

My father, Chief, went into the garage even before entering the house and deposited his handyman lunch box next to the vise and air compressor. In five minutes flat, the training wheels were off. This alteration changed things a bit, but the extra set of wheels hadn’t properly reached the ground anyway, so it wasn’t a dire transition.

That night I lay down in my bed feeling as if a good day’s work had been put in. I closed my eyes and dozed off immediately.

In retrospect there could have been a kinder, gentler way of fixing my negative color trigger from the burnt yellow on the bikes. All I had to do was ask Chief whether I could paint the bike. He probably would have let me. I could have painted it one solid color. Then, every time I got a glimpse of it, I would have felt a good feeling, or a plain yogurt feeling. Painting also would have been repetitive, quiet, and soothing. I don’t acutely taste vomit when I see burnt yellow or burnt sienna, but some synesthetes do. This phenomenon is called gustatory-auditory or gustatory-tactile synesthesia. While synesthesia is a gift, not a disability, I am relieved that I don’t have more kinds than the four kinds I have. I have colored letters, colored numbers, colored music, and a fragment of number personality synesthesia. The number nine is brown burnt umber to me. Its gender is male; it is like a package-deal story all wrapped up in a single shape. Synesthetes don’t get to choose which colors get attributed to which phonemes or graphemes. Otherwise, I would choose to see exclusively aqua Bahama Sea blue all day, but I can’t do it. (At least not without moving there.) Many of my alphabet colors are along the burnt sienna hues. I think that is part of the neurosensitivity that I was already used to in the womb environment, and my brain kept it. By the time I was given the hideous bicycle to ride, well, I was already used to the wrong colors cropping up at the wrong times on me. A brown grocery bag here, a yellow sunflower there. I wasn’t used to tasting the wrong thing: that’s gustatory-visual synesthesia. Or living with misophonia, where some sounds are excruciating. But I was becoming accustomed to feeling the wrong thing—that’s emotion-color synesthesia—and having to let it go.

Later in life Chief asked me whether I ever got sick of it, the distraction of synesthesia all the time; would I have been better off without it? If I could get rid of it, would I? I raised my eyebrows, alarmed, and immediately said no. Imagine colors as an original best friend that has never betrayed you, that has never let you down.

Fourth Grade

The movie Mid90s does a great job of documenting kid drama. In case you can’t remember some of the hilarity of youth, look no further. It’s probably the only film in existence that is one arduous ninety-minute big brother scene. But I didn’t grow up with a brother villain. Mid90s is also a dystopian film, covering the situation of growing up with parents that are trying to provide for you yet are too busy and not actual psychologists themselves. If I could go back in time and open up the white pages of the telephone book and call a psychiatrist to appraise us instead of our house, I would.

In fourth blue grade, some drama started to heat up, personally and at home. I had plenty to distract me from my pastime of looking for Ivy at recess—or rather the lack of time to assess his whereabouts at all. At some point I had acquired a downy rabbit-skin fur from a family vacation to Yosemite National Park. I was desperately in tune with what it represented: death. I had a kitten that would actually sleep on the rabbit fur, which was adorably perverse—another word I didn’t know yet. I was contemplating whether I too would reincarnate as a kitten blanket. I didn’t know how to spell perverse, but I still saw beige matter in the air.

I begged my mom for a real pet bunny when I saw one at Rainbow Hardware. She gave in in a desperate act of recompense for the sudden disappearance and death of our poor kitten.

What do you want to name him? she asked. The bunny sat in a cage in the back seat of the car next to me while my mom drove. I replied without any forethought, Bunnita.

Bunnita the bunny. That’s cuuute. Sassy was busy driving. She was never good with personal questions because she hated them herself. I stared out the window, but really, I was staring at the feeling the bunny had produced.

The blue was strong—it sort of permeated the whole word, and it was soft and fuzzy. I was seeing a lot of things in the air. So, I figured giving my pet a blue name was a way of fighting back against the injustice of constant bombardment.

Bunny ownership backfired. I didn’t take care of the bunny in a punctually obsessive way. Not only that but my parent failed to perceive any amount of cleverness in her child’s attempt at rhyming her pet’s name with its category.

Basically, my mother, Sassy, ended up sassing me around for not over caring for one of nature’s most delicate creatures. There were real jackrabbits in our far backyard, where it was too dangerous and thorny to walk without cowboy gear. It was so thorny it seemed impossible to imagine Bunnita wanting to escape to outback, desert like freedom. To protect her she had her own large hutch, which was within sight of the kitchen window. I let her out of it as much as possible.

I spent hours scooping rabbit poop from the hutch and spraying it with water to clean it. Before performing this operation, I would airlift Bunnita to the lawn. There she could nibble sweetgrass, dragging a leash behind her. Hop. Hop. While she hopped around nibbling, I brought my homework outdoors to do. Three hops, and I followed right next to her. I was a nine-year-old mom ready to pounce in this complicated after-school ritual that actually became a hardship. The longer I spent trying to prove myself and OCD perfect my bunny’s afternoon ritual, the more it backfired. I tried multitasking by watering the plants, watering my feet, eating a snack, and procrastinating on having to listen to whatever was going on indoors. Basically, I succeeded in achieving some tranquility in my life.

I was an outdoor creature by necessity, not choice. If anyone started talking loudly or breaking my concentration or the indoors didn’t live up to my colorful expectations, I could leave. The weather was hot most afternoons, but I usually went outside. The problem was that there were days I was at dance classes. Days I simply forgot to double-check Bunnita hadn’t knocked over her food dish. Sassy was infinitely faster at caring for Bunnita than I was. She realized that by eliminating the bunny from my life, she could control me better. Out of nowhere she insisted that I give it to a neighbor. She picked up the phone and offered my bunny to a new home in some sort of BOGO I’ll throw in some homemade cookies too type of deal. I wasn’t too socially astute, but I knew I was being manipulated. I handed Bunnita over. Technically Sassy’s logic was sound.

I could just walk two miles up the street and visit it.

If only she had understood petting Bunnita was actually a stimming ritual that helped me recover from my toxic public-school day. It was helping me relax on some fundamental level. I don’t know what happened to Bunnita. The family it went to had horses, so they probably took good care of it. It was a black-and-white lop-eared bunny.

Some people are noise averse, and they know it, but this wasn’t quite as obvious as that. It was like opening the fridge and wondering why mustard, a red word, wasn’t on the ketchup bottle and ketchup, an orange word, wasn’t on the mustard label. Then it would match better. Door slam. But if I tried to mention it, I had to agree that in the end it didn’t matter. Objects need names. Period.

My mother didn’t want anything weird to be going on with either of her children, so she made sure there wasn’t. First, I was allowed out on the patio by myself. Then I was allowed on the back porch by myself. At some point, as long as I promised not to cross the street, the yard was mine—a large ten-acre-sized yard. By the time I was in fourth grade, it wasn’t a mystery where I was. I was either in the yard playing Indian (I was the Indian) or I was swimming, reading, helping Chief, pruning plants, or digging holes for stake posts or feeding chickens. I might be walking across the street to feed the neighbor’s horse, walking to the end of the street to the cemetery. But that was where the line absolutely got drawn because there were cars going forty to fifty miles per hour on that stretch. There was a blind vertical hill.

In retrospect it was rare both to have the opportunity for that amount of alone time and to have the necessity for it. Chief needed adventure. Lola needed conversation. Sassy needed to bake. We all got our needs met. But it took real zealous energy to afford a homestead. I can’t tell you to what lengths we went to flourish in an arid abyss with only nature, the Audubon Society, and the occasional drive-in movie to entertain us. But we all made do. This was both my parents’ second marriage. They had kids now. It was a ride-or-die kind of situation where everyone was doing their ideal activities, but no one was on the same page.

There were days I didn’t include Lola in normal childhood play without any guilt. Many nights, one of my parents had to yell me back inside to come to dinner. But since yelling was involved, I saw the word dinnertime echoing out over the yard, spreading out in the general cone shape of its sound wave. We didn’t have cows; we had these endangered sheep with black heads and auburn wool that were supposed to be low maintenance and needed no shearing. The sheep rubbed on their fence like cats shedding, and I would collect sheep wool as one of my primary outdoor distractions. I knew there was a certain cleverness about a family who had found a way to look like a farm using low-maintenance animals. But I just took us for granted. We were definitely a curious bunch.

One Saturday morning Sassy said, Cover your ears. We are going to kill one of the sheep.

Not little Mikey!

No. Not little Mikey. An older sheep.

I knew we didn’t have a gun at the house and was full of questions. Sassy explained that Chief was friends with Sheriff Amoroso, who had the right to carry.

The sheep didn’t need shearing, but they needed food and brown salt licks. They needed a ram. The chickens needed feeding. The eggs needed harvesting. The side yard was where the sheep remains got buried. By buried I mean we dug the holes ourselves. One year we decided we were going to plant thirty Douglas fir trees ourselves. We did all that with no internet, no business cards, and no credit. My parents did it like a full-time hobby, day in and day out. They created a legacy life in the liminal moments of the day that they wouldn’t have been able to create alone. But they had different styles, and it backfired.

Around the time I was forced to give up my bunny, my parents were undergoing secret preparations for separation.

My dad surprised me by saying, Come on—we’re going to go. This was one night after dinner when it was semi late, and I had already lain down in bed. But he didn’t just say it; he reached out and down to grab me.

I kicked his shin. Hard.

He yelled Oww but didn’t curse, and we were at eye level, which was a rare occurrence. I glared back at him and stood my ground like a three-foot-tall warrior. It was a school night. It was all quiet. I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t want to look at