Three Green Circles

On synesthesia, and what woke me up

I was asleep when I decided to write this Substack.

Somewhere outside my apartment, a car or a truck honked its horn in the middle of the night. And it wasn’t the sound that woke me up.

It was the color.

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I have synesthesia.

It is a condition where the senses cross. Sound arrives and color appears. Not as imagination, not as metaphor, not as something I am choosing to picture. It simply happens, the way your heart beats without being asked, the way your eyes adjust to a dark room before your mind has caught up. The color is as real to me as the sound that made it.

I have lived with this my entire life. It is not something I think about. It is just how the world arrives to me.

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When a car horn sounds, I see three green circles.

Not the same size. One large, one medium, one small. They are vivid, the kind of green that is certain of itself, bright but not harsh, alive. The moment the sound hits they appear behind my eyes and they dance, lightly, the way something dances when it has been suddenly called into being and is still finding its place in the world.

They stay for exactly as long as the sound stays. When the horn stops, they slow. When the sound leaves the air entirely, they fade and are gone. The color is always connected to the sound. They are not two separate things.

They are the same thing.

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I lay there in the dark after the horn stopped and the circles faded.

I thought about how long I had been carrying this privately. How many sounds had become colors in rooms where no one knew. How many voices I had heard in color while the person speaking had no idea they were painting something inside me.

I decided that night to finally describe what I see.

This is where I will do it.

Adrian Adair