Morning in Brooklyn

The only thing I remember about last night's dream session is that I could taste colors and smell textures.  All morning I've wandered through farmer's markets and community gardens with my Brooklyn boyfriends and hunted down the aromas from flowers and fruit that made my blood itch and my fingers vibrate.

I've had this kind of sensual cross-wiring, known as synaesthesia, before.  When I was eight, running a temperature of 104, I couldn't look at my father's beard, or be covered with coarsely woven blankets; the warp and weft of the blanket, the intertwined strands of his dark hair, created a dischordant and nauseating vibration under my skin, especially my torso and fingers.  Texture came in units of violence. 

According to wikipedia, synesthesia isn't all that rare and comes in a lot of flavors; often people with one of its many forms have no idea that their experience isn't universal.  For instance, I strongly related to two of them:

both ordinal linguistic personification, in which numbers and letters have specific personalities - as long as I've been able to count that high, the number nine is a slinky, slightly untrustworthy but intriguing woman - late 20s, tall, long dark hair and eyes, wearing a revealing dark brown polyester dress and scoping for secrets; other numbers embody different features,

and also number form synesthesia where dates and seasons have precise locations on a visual map.  The year is an oval racetrack, and July and August occupy almost the entire length of one of the long sides, whereas September through June are crowded around the remaining space, getting smaller as they approach December, larger on the other side.  December is halfway through the other long side, and is the seam point where the track comes together; New Year's Eve is a narrow point through which time squeezes in order to enter January. 

Synaesthesia forms are notable for being both idiosyncratic, and stable.  I can't remember living without my yearmap and I was an adult before I wondered why the months weren't all the same size.  Possibly I took this for granted because it just makes sense: my map echoes both my school year (summer unaturally lengthened, the remainder of the year compressed) and the light cycle - growing up in northern Canada, the days are very long in midsummer, shortest at the end of December.  I wonder, if I'd grown up near the equator, whether my map would be round, with months more evenly spaced.

My time map has century blocks that lie sideways and progress left to right, where each decade is an angled row of bricks coming up from bottom left to top right.  Occupying the majority of the space slightly to the left of center is the only complete century: the 1900s.  Notable bricks are colored rather than being the usual cinderblock grey - 1941 and 1946 are blue, for my parents' birthdays.  My birthyear, 1971, in brown, my sister's, 1972, in yellow.  Before 1900 is a straggling stone wall, a collection of dates I know about from history, set in order but incomplete, with entire rows missing, a ruins.  The newest century lies on the other side of the 1999-2000 divide; the bricks are brand new, salmon colored and  uniform, but only a handful of rows thick.  To the right is empty space waiting to be developed.

It's breakfast time on a Sunday in Brooklyn, and the wizard in the kitchen is doing something magical with butter, free range eggs, shitake mushrooms, baby italian eggplant, and a bowl full of variegated green tomatoes.  The morning smells beautiful.