I’ve always had synesthesia.  I used to take all 64 crayons in the Crayola box and play with them as though they were people.  White, who is an old woman, married black, who is a man (though not old).  Letters have colors; numbers have colors; everything is alive.

My buddy Justin knows I have it, so he frequently forwards me articles about it, which is why I read this article last Thursday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248589.stm

It’s focused on a form of synesthesia which sounds amazingly cool but which I don’t have.    But these paragraphs grabbed my attention:

Two others are much rarer and perhaps even more bizarre.

Dr Simner explains: “There is one called ordinal-linguistic personification. So letters or numbers trigger, not colour, but the impression of a personality or gender.

“So, you don’t know that number seven is green, but you know that it’s a maniacal husband who comes home from work and shouts at his wife.

“You might not have a colour for Thursday, but you know that it’s a young girl who has spent too long kept in the house and wants to break out into the world.”

Another variant recently come to light is called mirror touch synaesthesia. This causes people to experience sensations of touch when they see other people being touched.

“So if I sat in front of you and scratched my nose, you would feel a scratch on your nose,” explains Dr Simner. Psychologists have linked this to a greater sense of empathy.

Yeah, well, duh.  Sure, I personify numbers and letters, but I didn’t know that was synesthesia, although it’s always been part of how I viewed them along with the colors.

But the one that freaked me out was the touch one.  If you sat in front of me and touched your nose, would I feel it?  Yes.  Wow.  Weird.

It’s not that I didn’t know that I felt things when other people do them.  I’ve known that for a long time.  I remember first watching the rather pathetic Empath episode of the original Star Trek back in the 1970s and thinking, well, yeah, that would be worse than what I already have.

Why did finding out about mirror touch synesthesia help me feel better about myself?  Imagine that for at least 52 years, you’ve felt it when other people touched their faces or scratched or hurt themselves.   On top of all the other things that make you weird, you have this weirdness you have to learn to deal with.  But when you read one of the few articles available on the subject (since they only discovered it in 2007), you learn that they even have a hypothesis of why it happens–mirror neurons may be involved.  There’s a physiological reason for your weirdness.

The only analogy I have to this feeling is when my son was tested for food allergies and, in looking over his results, I realized a possible reason for why freshly baked bread gives me a stomachache–he was allergic to yeast.

And so I started chronicling the weirdness with Justin.

The first thing I came up with was an encounter a couple of weeks ago when he touched his face 5 times during our brief conversation and because I felt it, I thought he’d notice that I was touching mine right after him.

As we walked down the hall, he purposely touched his cheek, and I felt it.

And so I’ve been chronicling the weirdness of being a mirror-touch synesthete.

For example, my brother curls his toes under–it used to annoy me because I felt it.

When my kids crack their knuckles, I feel it, so I ask them not to do that in front of me.

If a ballet dancer dances en pointe, I block my view of his feet.

My ex-husband learned that he could annoy me by touching himself on the space between his nose and upper lip.  It made that space on me tickle.

This morning, there were more revelations.  One day I found myself overcome with lust for Justin, whom I previously hadn’t looked at with lust, when he raised his arms above his head, revealing his abdomen, which he then touched.  I felt an overwhelming desire to touch and kiss his abdomen.

A couple of weeks ago, Justin was playing with a wig.  He said he enjoyed having long hair, but since the wig wasn’t attached, hair kept falling into his eyes, so he kept readjusting it.  I was really annoyed by it and wanted him to stop, but I didn’t realize that my annoyance sprung from the fact that I could feel the wig slipping around on my own head.

But the most important revelation for me was that one reason I can’t stand to eat around other people is because I feel it when I watch them eat, and especially if they’re eating meat, I feel disgusted (I’ve been a vegetarian for decades).

When you feel it physically when others touch themselves; when the numbers and letters have colors and personalities and gender; when everything is alive and dancing around you, with Shinto-like spirits in every tree and rock–it  makes you feel estranged from the rest of humans and gives you a bizarre worldview, a sense of omnipotence in your belief that you know exactly what everyone needs from you at any given time.

More chronicles to come.

Oh, well, it didn’t work out again.  Oh, well, you have fun while I’m stuck here.

Take this dog–please.  I’ve had Justin’s dog for 5 weeks.  He doesn’t have a place yet, so I’m stuck walking his dog every morning between 4:30 and 6:00 a.m., depending on when the dog wakes up.  The dog loves me, and I love the dog, but I’m such an idiot to take care of him.  It means that I occasionally see Justin, who reports on his river rafting trips, the girls he’s encountered, and  concerts he’s attended.

This morning, we walked in a thunderstorm and I, of course, wanted to die.   An accident would be fine.   Getting struck by lightning would be fine.

According to the countdown clock I have on my iGoogle page, I’m stuck here for 3 years and 21 days more.

Oh, well.  Back to work.

At the cemetery, we ran into my cousins who live 60 miles away.  My cousin and I only have a few genes and ancestors in common, but I’ve always liked her.  She looks much older than I do, mostly because she’s smoked cigarettes for years while I’ve been hiding away from sun and expensive vices.  

She told us about going on her daughter’s wedding cruise for 8 days.  I didn’t even know she had a daughter, let alone that she was married.  

It’s odd running into people every year or two at the cemetery on Memorial Day.  I met a cousin a few years ago who was looking at our mutual great-great-great-grandfather’s grave.  She emailed me for awhile, but when I declined her invitation to set me up with a friend of hers, she never bothered again. 

This nearly random running into relatives, or finding out that your brother visited town, but didn’t bother to see you–it’s all part of the isolation of my life, the way I am not worthy of being a friend or having a close relationship with anyone, but hey, at least some of them, like my smoker cousin,  say hello.

Tonight, I get “our” dog, which unfortunately, Justin is still talking about giving away.   The dog whines when he’s left without one of us, and his friend’s neighbors are complaining, so the dog has to stay with me tonight.  I hope he figures out a way to keep this dog because the dog is practically perfect (what’s a little howling amid the noise that surrounds us?).

“If you’ve suffered from traumas such as major depression or panic attacks, [that] conditions you to believe that uncomfortable emotions mean you are going to suffer…again.”

Since my outlook on life is based on rejection–when will I be fired?  when will this person decide they don’t like me?–it’s difficult to wait for the rejection.  It’s easier to just give up.  

I asked Justin in an email a couple of weeks ago if, once we were no longer in a band together, we could taper it off into nothingness, and he replied “No such luck with the whole taper thing…”  That is scary.  In the past, I didn’t even realize what I was doing (and sometimes still don’t know what I did) to end a friendship.  What if I do something without meaning to and hurt this kind human who is currently my friend?  I’d rather just end it now and get it over with, but maybe he is the one person who would stick around.  

At the moment, though, it helps to realize that he is not my former friend Timothy, nor my former therapist Bob–the one I filed a complaint against–and rejection isn’t necessarily imminent.   I am so uncomfortable having a friend that I want to run away (e.g., kill myself sooner), but the truth is that I feel happier in his presence.  I just have to calm down.

Yesterday, I tagged along with Justin on a trip to the pet store and I realized what a mistake that was.  It was one of our few out-of-school journeys thus far, and between talking too much and almost talking about suicide and generally feeling in the way, I came home a wreck, more determined than ever not to hang out with him or Lynn this summer.   Realistically, I can see that I wasn’t that bad, but the perception of my stupidity made it a painful encounter.

Justin took the signature strengths test at www.authentichappiness.org and one of his signature strengths is kindness.   I figure that’s why he’s kind to me.

This morning they dropped by to see me and encourage me to go hiking with them and Justin’s dog, and I told them no.  I wish I never had to see either of them again.  One more week of school, and that should be the end.

I did come up with a new mantra to get through the summer:  ”Every day that I’m alive is an advantage to my children.”  Can’t leave now–they’ll be stuck with that jerk and they won’t get a big enough monthly check from my retirement.  Gotta stick around.  Best way to do that–avoid the turmoil from having friends.

Since dogs have short life expectancies, it might not be bad to have a 6-year-old dog.  It could easily be gone before I leave the world, and caring for it could ease some of the rough troughs of depression.  Besides, there are always lots of teenage boys at my house who could help take care of it.  We’ll see.

Because Justin was there, I went for a walk up to the high school with him, my son, and the dog.  When you have agoraphobia, there are plenty of places you avoid, and walking on this path made me realize that I haven’t been on it for well over a year, even if it is 5 minutes away from my home.  We also went into the back yard, and I pointed out my hammock which I used once last summer and hadn’t walked to so far this spring.  All that stuff in my back yard seems so far away when I’m alone, but given a role to play and company, I can find myself in the back yard, helping to string a metal fence to hold a dog.   I didn’t go all the way to the back yard shop, a 20 second journey from the back door, but this was the closest I’ve been in a couple of years.  

Being in the pit band with Justin conducting meant that I spent a lot of time during the last six weeks staring at him, and then last night while we were sitting in the yard with the dog, we stared at each other for at least 20 seconds.  What does that mean?  Such a long gaze between two friends?  I also said that if we do continue being friends beyond the time the dog leaves our house in June, then perhaps we could have a weekly movie night.  That is the first time I’ve expressed hope in a friendship for at least 10 years.  He may be half my age, but he is extraordinary.

This week, though, I was overcome with negativity and a little too verbal about my suicidal ideation.  We’re weary anyway because of the musical we’re in–he conducts, I’m in the band.  It’s hard to work all day and then practice or perform for hours each night.   Then he had a stressful event occur with a parent, a typical teacher/parent interaction in a way, but draining.  I realized that even though he still seems to like me and doesn’t mind if I mention suicide, it isn’t fair to him.

Yesterday, I told him, “I won’t mention suicide again because it isn’t fair to you, and if I slip up you can fine me or something.”

“Fine you?” he said.  ”What would I fine you?”

“I don’t know.  Something…”

“I know,” he said.  ”Each time you mention it, you have to stay alive another year.”

That was pretty funny.

In a far less funny comment, the school secretary asked me if I was ready to drink the Jim Jones Kool-aid because of the stress of year’s end.  I replied that cyanide would be a particularly horrible way to die, and we moved on to child poisoning from there.   Well, yes, I could have said.  I *am* suicidal.  I think about it every day.  I plan to stay alive for three more years, but after that, I’m outta here, and at this moment, I’m wondering if I’ll make it for three more years.   But she wouldn’t really want to know.  She, of course, doesn’t know about my plans so she didn’t know that she was speaking to a future suicide, but it struck me as particularly humorless.

On the other hand, every time I think of Justin’s idea of a fine, I smile.