I am being perfectly serious.
It appears that someone I know has synesthesia. In Scientific American issue from last fall (volume 16, Number 3, 2006) there was an article about synesthesia "Hearing colours, tasting shapes", which says:
"They [the synesthetes] experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious no-man's-land between fantasy and reality. For them the senses -touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell- get mixed up instead of remaining separate. In the most common form of synesthesia, looking at a number evokes a specific hue. This phenomenon apparently occurs because brain areas that normally do not interact when processing numbers or colors do activate each other in synesthetes."
So, in a way, the brains of synesthetes are more advanced since they have more synaptic connections that the brains of lesser mortals like us.
Anyway, I couldn't resist asking her what senses does my name evoke. According to her, whenever she hears my voice, or sees me or my name, she tastes warm tea with honey mixed with it. She feels warm, and sees a sunny field on a summer day, a meadow. The colour of my name, however, is difficult to define (the same situation as if you were trying to describe the colour blue to a person who's been blind all of his life). My personal weakness of not understanding the dozen shades of the colour white, for instance, creates I have difficulties to understand what kind of colour she sees when I enter the room; not pink or fuchsia, but something like the shade of red that appears on the sky during sunset and dawn; cherry juicy colour; the colour of the roses many people have decorated their gardens with. I think I have an idea of what she means.
- - -
I saw Her today (hey, I saw you rolling your eyes!). I saw Her yesterday, too. And last Friday I was in close proximity with Her. My mind keeps running wilder and wilder; this time, as She was sitting there, I kept imagining how I would open that one button on Her shirt... take it of and kiss Her neck, lightly caressing Her arms with my fingertips... opening Her hair and running my fingers through them as I would watch Her beautiful eyes and lips...
Was there really a time when I seriously thought I was over Her, ready to move on?
