Synaesthesia...

       Hey, merry Boxing Day, I hope you had an awesome Christmas/Hanukkah/winter, etc. I felt like writing lazily today, but I also wanted to get my teeth into something a little bit. I thought I'd try to explain how I see the world. Maybe you won't get this, because it's pretty abstract, I guess. Perhaps it will make perfect sense and will give a name to something you couldn't explain before, and didn't know was a 'thing'. 

      Also, I've sorted out the comment thing so that now anyone can comment. Please feel free to if you've found this in any way interesting. This is a completely true account of how I think of things, and hopefully I've worded it in a way which makes some shred of sense to at least one of you.

       I see things like they’re colours. There’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is. I don’t think I’ve explained myself very well; what I mean is, when I think of days of the week, months, numbers – whatever, my mind associates a colour with it. Wednesday is yellow, February is an icy sort of blue and the number two is red. Sometimes ‘two’ is big and red on a yellow background, but that’s not all the time.

            I swear, by the way – in case you were wondering, that I’m not under the influence of any alcohol or drugs – this is an ‘all-the-time’ thing. Synaesthesia. That’s what it’s called. There are other types – some people personify these things, rather than just let their mind colour them in.

            I place so much emphasis on colour; perhaps because of my ‘condition’, perhaps because I’m mildly obsessive-compulsive in my tendencies. I like to put coloured pencils and felt tip pens in ‘colour order’. My idea of colour order is essentially the order of the colours in the rainbow. Sometimes I like to start with red and move through orange, then yellow, through green then blue, purple, pinks etc. Sometimes I mix it up and begin with yellow; as long as it’s logical in my mind. Sometimes I spend minutes, sometimes ordering my stationary can take half an hour – there is no greater joy than getting a set of coloured pens of pencils which are already in the right order.

            I also eat sweets in colour order. Although, that tends to be flavour-based; unless it’s M&Ms.

            It’s not as uncommon as you might think and it’s not unpleasant. It only becomes unpleasant when something interrupts the order in which I place my colours; I hate so much when someone else uses my pens/pencils and put them back in the wrong places. I hate this for two reasons; firstly, it makes me physically uncomfortable to see colours in the wrong order – yellow should never go next to dark blue, green should not go next to red unless it’s Christmas. Secondly, I feel really awkward and regimented sitting there swapping them all over in front of them, so I have to be uncomfortable about the placement of my pens until I can move them. It’s fine if they’re in a pencil case as they move around by themselves, but if they’re in a line, it makes me crazy.

            The only thing about being obsessive about colour order for whatever reason, and also seeing things as colours, is that I get pretty irritated that I don’t see the days of the week, the months or number sequences in colour order. I can live with that in terms of months and numbers, which I’ll explain – months have more pastille colours than weekdays so the colours look far more pleasant together than Wednesday and Thursday do. Numbers are brighter colours, typically, so also look more pleasant together. In addition to this – numbers are rarely (past the age of 6 or 7( orange and purple)) placed in order of 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. Therefore, numbers present less of a problem in my mind because they jump around a lot. I should/could also mention here, that numbers don’t often remain still; they sometimes pulsate and expand and shrink. I think that comes under the same umbrella as seeing things as colours; like I said, there are different types of Synaesthesia.

            Going back to days of the week – they’re a sequence, and are written one after the other generally, or at least are thought of in order. This then becomes like the pen thing, where dark blue and yellow look awful and uncomfortable together in my mind. I think I said earlier that Wednesday in yellow; Thursday is a dark purple, so looks marginally better than dark blue would, but the yellow of Wednesday is murky and mustard like – not a nice canary yellow like the number one is.

            The honest truth about this is that if you don’t have Synaesthesia, you won’t really understand synaesthesia. This has probably been the best way I could describe and/or explain it, without getting super technical. The other truth, of course, is that I have very little clue as to the technicalities here; I think it’s to do with synapses in the brain interacting in abnormal ways – which is fun.

Life is so good with this much colour, and I can’t imagine a world where things weren’t colours; probably in the way that you can’t imagine which kind of crazy I see the world through.

         One last thing I will say is that I’ve seen things in this way since I knew what numbers and letters and colours were – so as far as I know, it’s not something you develop. The colours may have faded as I’ve gotten older, but that could be down to the day; sometimes colours are just more vivid. If only you could see the plethora of colours which I can see right now while I’m putting this into words. (Mostly it’s purple, but there are splashes of red and orange here and there, and bits of blue - it’s nicer than it sounds.) I will tack a quote I found when I was looking for the name of this which I totally got, and which made me feel pretty warm inside: '...Pat Duffy told her father, 'I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and 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." 

                Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy the rest of the festive season, Laura

                                               xoxoxox

Silence

     Hey! Here's a horror-y piece I did last year. I should clarify that when I say 'last year' I mean the last academic year. Actually, this piece was for the Hallowe'en week, so it was last year in both senses...whatever. Anyhow, I hope you like it, I was, and am, pretty pleased with it.

‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown’ – H.P. Lovecraft.

  

He crouched, in absolute quietude. It was so deafening that he could barely form a thought. After a moment or so, he became aware of small sounds, which would usually be an irritant to him. The plink, plink, plink of a cheap, ill-fitted tap over a presumably cheap, ill-fitted sink. There was laughter from the room beyond, and the sound of cutlery being made to dance over bacon and china. In a way, this indication that human life was so close was a comfort to him; however they didn’t take away from the fact that at any second, he could be ripped from behind the iron curtain in which he had found sanctuary.

                The world went dark; it had been for quite some time when finally, he awoke; stiff from crouching for so long. He wasn’t sure what had roused him at first, and could not completely remember why he was there to begin with. Then he heard the wailing of hinges as heavy footsteps entered the room. He held his breath. Eyes wide; sweat beginning to escape his pores. His limbs shook violently, threatening to throw him off-balance, revealing his position to whoever belonged to the footsteps.

                The being stopped almost right outside the stall he was occupying and, evidently unaware that he shared the space with anyone else, began to whistle something which could have been anything, and was quite clearly out of tune.  The sound was comforting to him, aside from being almost intolerable to the ear. His lungs released the stale air from within themselves, grateful for the fresh oxygen which was now filling them. The whistling stopped, The gentleman outside his dingy asylum zipped up his trousers and exited. Not bothering to wash his hands.

                He breathed a second sigh of relief, he was alone again, or so he thought. He took a moment to survey his surroundings. The room wasn’t well lit, mostly due to the fact that he was sitting inside a small cubicle in a dark corner; the whole bathroom had one broken bulb, one flickering bulb, and one dim bulb. The tiles landscaping the walls were at one time white, however they were now a murky colour somewhere between grey and egg-shell blue. The floor wasn’t any colour he’d ever seen before, but more an amalgamation of white, yellow, brown and most disturbingly of all; red.

                He began to relax a little bit, fidgeting to try and make his position more comfortable. That’s when I decided to alert him to my presence. I could tell he wasn’t expecting it at all, after all, I don’t make much of an entrance, and I can remain in the same position for hours, blending in with the surroundings, appearing as only a ripple in the light or a shadow in the darkness; sometimes people do a double-take, and on the second glance they scrutinise my general area as if they expect me to wave. As I dropped I gained substance, I landed on him with quite some weight to me, I felt him become rigid, felt his muscles tighten and his blood run cold. All the hairs on his body stood to attention and he tried to scream. The scream failed and all he managed was a squeaky whimper, and a tiny amount of urine escaped his bladder. He knew what to expect; we’d made our feelings clear to him from the start. We don’t do favours for free. He should have known that he can’t escape us; we see all, move through time and space, move through walls and mountains, pass through the core of the earth and feel no pain. We can tear a man limb from limb, and never feel remorse. So this is what I planned to do: take him out into the main part of the bathroom in which he’d taken refuge, and tear him apart, piece by piece, as if he were a simple child’s toy.

                ‘Please! Please, no!’ he wailed, as if it were going to help. I merely sneered in reply. His eyes were bulging now; I could see the terror mounting and feel it too, coming from his very heart, his veins, his sweat. He panted panicked pleas, apologies and empty promises. It was too late for all that. I began bounding his body to the air around him; stretched him out like the Vitruvian Man, he struggled against my invisible bonds, looking to his left arm, then his right, eyes ballooning as he felt my ropes boring into his wrists; seeing them draw blood even, but not actually witnessing them do the work.

                I was enjoying this. I fed off of his fear, turning it into pure ecstasy. He writhed and wriggled, trying to free himself from the trap I was creating just for him. I summoned some of my fiercest and hungriest demons. They gnashed their jaws at him, salivating. He howled, the way that humans so often do. Nobody in the room yonder heard a thing, nobody came to his aid; they were all too busy pouring bitter coffee into their already over-stuffed bellies.

                 I began by tearing open his shirt, revealing his fast inflating and deflating chest. Then I made small lesions, allowing his blood to escape, driving my minions to distraction, they began giggling with the anticipation of sinking their teeth into fresh human meat. I then began breaking the bones in his fingers, turning them to grit; I continued this all the way up his arms, through his chest and down his legs. I left his head alone, I wanted him to see this, actually feel and bear witness to the consequences of his betrayal. He vociferated his pain, as if it would make a difference. He was becoming desperate now, trying anything to make me stop. I considered it for a moment; leaving him there on the floor of the dirty bathroom, all his bones crushed to dust and bleeding from his bare torso, for some innocent person to find him, and probably vomit, ending up mentally scarred for the rest of their life. But I didn’t have any desire to upset innocent humans, so I dropped him from his shackles, giving my followers the signal that they were to begin their feast.

                They tore him limb from limb, spraying blood across the bathroom floor, intestines and bone dust leaked out, he screamed the entire time. Eventually, there was silence; apart from the plink, plink, plink of an ill-fitted tap, over a very ill-fitted sink.

            Hope you liked it! I may be a bit more absent than normal for a while; deadlines and whatnot, you know how it is.

             If I don't post between now and Christmas, MERRY CHRISTMAS GUYS! And happy New Year!

                                 Thanks for reading, Laura

                                                                xoxoxoxox

http://www.free4down.net/search/christmas-animals/

Deleted posts/ Jeff and the Giant Apple

       Hiya. I've unfortunately had to delete a couple of blog posts today - Awakening and How to Fight a Dragon - which is a big ol' shame, seeing as they were two of the most popular blog posts on here. Anyway, I had to take them down because I want to submit them for coursework, and it says in the guidelines that the work can't have been published in any way, shape or form, prior to submission, which I didn't consider when I posted them.*cry*

        I'm thinking I'll be putting them back up a while after I get the results back for them, which will probably be in February, and they're likely to be of a higher standard by then too. So, to make up for taking dragons away from you, here's a sci-fi-ish piece I wrote for my coursework last year, it's a bit Douglas Adams-y, because I love him and he is my literary hero. I called it Jeff and the Giant Apple, because we were told to write a story including 'an apple, a painter, and an abandoned castle.' This how my mind works:

The castle was chilly, damp and musty. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d been asked to do a  job in a decrepit, abandoned castle; they’d gone out of fashion in 2136, only a few years after coming into fashion. The problem with castles in general, is that nobody wants to eat a meal which takes at least half an hour to get to the table after being served. They tried in vain to come up with a solution; moving the dining tables closer to the kitchen – this only resulted in a rise in doctors’ appointments. Then they tried conveyer belts, but it turned out that they tend to move at about the same speed as people, and don’t move faster when shouted at. They even tried teleportation devices, which, apart from being a huge eye-sore, caused gargantuan fires, wiping out an entire generation of RoboMaids43Z. Eventually, they gave up on the whole escapade, leading to a massive increase in caravan sales.               

                He looked around, shuddered and then noticed something, or rather, nothing, because the thing he had noticed was that something was missing. There was no dust, cobwebs, or mould. He stood open mouthed for a while before reminding himself that a person who can afford a castle can probably afford a self-cleaning one. Just as he came to this realisation however, he saw a figure with an extremely bulbous head standing silhouetted against the doorway opposite him.

                ‘H...hello?’ the painter offered, not expecting a reply, at least not one in his own language. The reply which he at first thought he had imagined shocked him more than seeing the outline of the thing in the first place.

                ‘Ahh, hello, daahling! What is bringing you here?’ from this, the painter could deduct with near certainty, that the creature he was speaking with was female, mostly. ‘Don’t be shy, daahling! Would you like a pina colada?’ the painter stood rooted to the spot, mouth agape, not able to answer with anything more than a blink.

The creature began moving towards him, he considered running from the place screaming, but firstly, his legs would not move, despite all of his willing, and secondly, he was pretty sure that anything with a head that round would either have super-Martian speed, or an army who did all the running for it. Instead, he came up with the plan that it the thing got too close to him; he could shoot it in the face with his Paint-o-Matic Ray gun carbine 3000, which would at least give him time to get to somewhere near the front door.

Once the thing came into the light however, he realised that it was not a ‘thing’ at all, but an oddly proportioned woman wearing a somewhat abstract hat.

‘That’s a very, abstract hat’ blurted out the painter, not exactly knowing how the woman would react and wishing he hadn’t said anything.

‘This old thing? Thank you, daahling! I made it myself you know!’

‘Oh, you did?’

‘Yeees, I entered it into a competition once on saturn, when it won me first place for largest apple in the galaxy-‘

‘It is a very large apple’ observed the painter

‘Don’t interrupt me daahling! Where was I? Yes, when it won me first prize for largest apple in the galaxy, I didn’t want it to go to waste, so I emptied it and made 50 apple pies for the local laundrette and use the outside as a hat, it makes for very good storage you know. Now, about that pina colada...’

‘When you say storage-‘

‘Pardon daahling, oh, yes, I like to keep things in my hat, why at the moment, my little kitty cat is in there! Come out now Mr Nibbles! He’s very shy.’ She lifted up the apple to reveal a mass of bright orange hair, from which she lifted a tiny grey tabby. She now held the kitten out in front of her with her hands under his front legs. The painter had never seen a cat display such a range of emotions, anger, fear and confusion were among the mix, but it seemed that it was becoming more and more difficult to form expressions as its tiny head sunk into its shoulders and its body extended by the second. Eventually the woman put down the cat and it scurried away into the shadows, not to be seen again for some weeks. ‘Well, I won’t see him again for a while; it’s so much easier when I keep him in my hat.’ The woman sounded remorseful as she watched the cat scuttle away, but quickly turned back to the painter with a large grin ‘So, daahling, you never told me your name! And why you are here.’ It took a moment for the painter to register that he had to answer this.

‘Oh erm, I’m Jeff, and I’m here to paint.’

‘Very good, daahling! Yes, it’s the upstairs lavatory; it’s been such a boring shade of hot pink for so long, I really would like a change you know’

‘What colour were you thinking of changing it to?’ the woman considered for a moment, before returning her attention to him

‘I think what might be nice, is a little, apple green daahling, to match my hat, don’t you think?’ Jeff nodded, not really in agreement, it was more to do with the fact that he thought the woman was totally insane, and reasoned that if he were to argue with her, she might become quite unstable. ‘Now daahling, you still haven’t answered my question; would you like a pina colada?’

‘Erm, it’s a quarter past ten in the morning, isn’t it a little early for cocktails?’ Jeff asked meekly. The woman stared on and considered for a moment.

‘I could make it a mocktail daahling; I take out the pineapple and make it with apples instead?’

‘I think the idea of a mocktail, is that you take out the alcohol, not the fruit.’

‘Well where’s the fun in that daahling! Ok fine you have your way; you can have some fruit juice.’ She turned around and began to saunter off. Jeff began to follow her.

‘I’d rather tea, if you’ve got any.’

‘Daahling, I haven’t seen a tea bag since 2112’ Jeff turned around, dejected, if he was going to carry on being a painter in this day and age, he would have to start bringing his own tea bags. 

I hope you enjoyed this, I still like this one, so it must be a bit good.

Thanks for reading! Laura

                               xoxoxox