I’ve always tried to explain this thing to Kyle, about how certain things file away in certain places in my imagination. When I just say that, he says, “Well of course. Everyone does that.” But I really don’t think he understands. It’s not that the letters of the alphabet have specific colors, nor do numbers, nor the days of the week. If I have ever felt like one letter should be a certain color, it has changed, transformed. I could tell you once all of the letters and their colors, but I guarantee you that the next time I do it, most of them will be different. Not even months, except the colors that seem to make sense to everyone, because of the weather and holidays we associate with them (where January is a light blue, February a light gray-pink, March a soft yellow, April a kind of lilac, May a more bold light green, June is an orange-yellow, July is a deep orange-red, August a reddish-brown, September a golden-brown, November a deep brown, and December is the Tumblr blue). The colors I associate with months make sense, because the winter months have cooler colors than the warm colored summer and fall months. My numbers don’t have personalities, like Kyle’s do, and my letters don’t have genders. The ring of a telephone doesn’t produce red swirls in my vision, and my cat’s meows never made mango colored puffs of smoke in the air. I’ve always really wanted something like that, but the truth is I just don’t have it.

But somehow, everything else has color. Not a prominent, visible color projected into the room I’m in or into my spacial view, but a color and shape and texture, taking up space in my imagination. Some things aren’t always concrete, like the colors that certain songs have, or the way a cold, cloudy day can sometimes sound like an F# Major 7 chord or a D# minor add a 9. But some things are. I know that certain chord progressions perfectly encompass entire childhood memories, and those memories all file away into separate categories in my imagination, placed around in different areas. For example, the memories associated with walking down any city street go towards where my left hand falls when I stand up. A lot of other nostalgic things seem to be suspended in mid-air down there, too. All of my anime references seem to be near my right shoulder, as well as any quotes I can remember from books and poems, whereas I keep my music knowledge right in front of me, in line with my belly button. When I am trying to translate between any latin-based languages, it seems like I’m focusing on my storage at eye level, by my temples, but the few things I know in Korean and Japanese are right under my chin. Every friendship and relationship I have, both with people and with my pets, has a different place in my spacial thinking. My months and my relationships have the same circular shape that rings around my head, but extends far into space. December and January are right behind my head, and then in a counter-clockwise motion, February is to the right of January, kind of by my temple, March is even further out to the right and forward a bit, and they progress in that way until June and July sit in front of me, a bit too far out for me to reach. Then they come closer, as if completing a halo around my head, all the way back to December. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about these things in depth, but now that I am putting them into words in a paragraph, they make perfect sense to me. 

There’s a lot more that I want to talk about, but I’ll save it for later.