Colour My World

COLOUR MY WORLD

It wasn’t always like this. But, I’ve been this way for so long, it’s hard to remember what it was like before … Before the bus hit me.

*****

It was just a normal day. A normal Tuesday. School was over for the day, and a bunch of us were waiting at the bus stop, student passes in hand. We were chatting. There were seven of us. We all took the same bus home every day after school. Status quo.

I remember I was talking to Renee, I just can’t remember what we were talking about. I’d said something I found witty, and she was laughing. Then I was flying and Renee disappeared. All I remember is thinking the sky was really, really blue. I found out later that the bus had hit me, and I was airborne. Apparently I flew quite the distance and crashed into a parked car, head first. I think I heard screaming, but that could just be me projecting what I’ve been told.

I woke up in the hospital. When I asked what day it was, they told me it was Thursday. I was stunned. I’d been unconscious for two days—two days I’d never get back. It wasn’t until my doctor—a stressed looking woman named Dr. Kinsey—informed me that I had been in a coma for almost a month. A month! They had put me in a medically induced coma to give my brain a chance to heal.

You see, the top of my skull had been crushed when I did the header into the car. I also had fractures on the side of my skull from when I landed on the curb after the header. Good news, though, I didn’t land face first. So, there’s that.

My mom told me what happened. The driver lost control of the bus, and it jumped the curb. Most of the group were sideswiped by the bus. I don’t want you to think that being sideswiped by an out of control city bus is no big deal. It is a very big deal. Broken bones, crushing injuries, internal bleeding, concussions—all kinds of trauma. But it was Renee and me who were struck head-on by the front bumper of the bus. Because of the way we were standing, Renee was crushed under the front wheels of the very big, very heavy bus, while I was launched into space. Of the two of us, I was the lucky one. Renee died laughing about something stupid that I said.

I’m not looking for sympathy. There is no cautionary tale here. I’m just a teenager who was hit by a bus, and lived to tell the tale.

Of course there were months and months of rehab—everything that I did naturally for most of my life was gone. Relearn to walk. Relearn to talk. Even relearn how to swallow. Who knew that swallowing wasn’t innate? The things you have to relearn when you come out of a coma! And the new things you learn when you come out of the coma that were never part of your life before.

When I woke up in the hospital, I learned things had changed. My brain was very different post-bus compared to pre-bus.

Some might call is synesthesia—you know, numbers and letters take on certain colours in your brain. Like you see the number four and it’s always yellow. But this isn’t really like that. Not exactly. I still see colours but in an entirely different context.

How can I explain this without you thinking that maybe my rehab did not go as well as I thought it did?

Okay, here goes.

When people talk it’s like their breath takes on a certain colour. And that colour corresponds to what the person is feeling and saying. Every single time.

This is my new reality.

So, if you lie, I see blue. And, just to keep me on my toes, there are different shades of blue. Dark blue—big lie, like saying you love someone but you don’t. Little lie—light blue, like those pants don’t make you look fat.

Get it?

Happiness and joy are yellow, and really happy is a beautiful gold.

Anger is red. There is a whole spectrum of angry, from light pink for annoyed to blood red for furious. When someone is angry the colour kind of undulates between the different shades. Sometimes, I get distracted by the different hues of red. It would be quite beautiful if the person putting on the light show wasn’t losing their bananas.

Physical pain is green, sadness is grey. Stress is orange, Worry is purple. Guilt is maroon. Frustration is silver.

You get the idea.

It’s so tiring—all the colours all the time. The only time there aren’t colours floating around, is when I’m alone. Which is really hard because I’m a human being who lives in the real world, surrounded by people and all their colours.

At first I was so confused. Like when Dr. Kinsey first came in to see me.

She introduced herself. The air around her was a light purple—mild worry. Then she started to explain my condition.

“You have sustained a very severe head trauma.” Darker purple with orange streaks—stress and worry. As she continued to talk the vibrant waves of orange and purple continued to swirl up and around.

At first, I had no idea what was happening. There is no handbook for this kind of thing. I was certainly not going to tell anyone about my very weird and very unexplained … what? Visions? Hallucinations? I did not want to be telling people what I was seeing. It was not a secret I wanted to share—with anyone.

So I tried to tough it out by myself.

It was slow going, but, eventually, I was beginning to correlate colours to thoughts and emotions.

My mom was always my biggest cheerleader. She became my touchstone. “You are doing so well!” Like Dr. Kinsey, orange and purple.

“You’re going to be walking again in no time!” Brown and blue. I knew Mom was scared for me, and I’d already spoken with the Dr. Kinsey, and at the time it was about fifty-fifty that I’d be able to walk unassisted again, so I wasn’t going to be walking “in no time.” So, one of the colours was fear, and the other colour was lying.

But, when I took those first steps, she was shrouded by yellow light, almost gold. “You did it!” she yelled, tears in her eyes. Gold was good.

Along with physical therapy, I also had sessions with the hospital’s psychiatrist, Dr. Menendez.

“Lily, you’re progressing well, physically, but I’m concerned about your mental state.” Light purple swirled around his head. I looked at Dr. Menendez, blankly. I couldn’t let him know how frightened I was.

He continued. “You don’t seem to be celebrating your own achievements. Why is that?”

I just shrugged.

“Normally, I would expect to see anger, frustration, happiness; maybe some fear and worry. But you’re not exhibiting any of these emotions. Why is that?”

I just shrugged again. I couldn’t tell him that while I was working hard on all my rehab, I was a little distracted by all the colours, and scared witness.

“Lily, I’m here to listen to you. Anything you tell me stays between just us. No one will ever know what we talked about unless you tell them, because I won’t be discussing our conversations, at all. Ever.” He smiled at me, lilac colours haloing his head—concern.

We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes. That’s one of the things that I liked about Dr. Menendez—he never pressured me to say or do anything.

I wanted to tell him. I really did. But how do you tell someone you see colour when they talk?

Instead of telling him, I just sat there.

“Can you tell me what’s bothering you.Lily?” Lilac.

I took a big breath and said, “Nothing’s bothering me.” I’m pretty sure that if I could see my own breath, it would have been dark blue because that was a big fat lie..

“Okay. We can just sit here, if you want.” He smiled. “Or, you can tell me how rehab is going.”

“Rehab’s good,” I said. “You know, learning how to walk, talk, swallow.” I shrugged. “I did it when I was a baby, I can do it again.” My speech was mostly back to normal, and I was so proud and happy about that—golden happy. No brain fog (the real kind, not the colourful kind), I never really had to search for words. In fact, I’d been back to online schooling for about a month, and everything seemed to be going well. Instead of sharing my joy, I shrugged and said, “School’s good, too.”

Dr. Menendez smiled. “Good.” Yellow and lilac. He nodded his head towards my legs. “I see you retired the cane.” Big smile, bright yellow.

Wow, I thought, he really does care! So I figured I should give him something. “Yeah. It’s great.”

More smiling, but the yellow dimmed just a bit, and I could see tiny swirls of purple begin to appear. “And everything’s okay with your head? No headaches? No blurry vision?” he asked. More purple.

Unconsciously I touched my head. My hair was just starting to grow back in. When I had come out of the coma, the parts of my head where they had had to rebuild my skull had been shaved completely down to the scalp—a zero on the clippers, while the other parts of my head were untouched. That meant that I hair past my shoulders on the back and one side, and nothing on top and on the left-hand side of my skull. It looked like a very badly maintained monk’s tonsure. So I decided to shear it all off. I looked like that Demi Moore character, G.I. Jane, or Britney Spears when she lost her mind. Bald is beautiful, right? Weirdly, my hair was growing in white where my skull that had been repaired or replaced with a plate.. So, that was going to be a look on a seventeen year old.

“Everything’s good,” I said still tracing the scars on my scalp with my fingers.

He nodded. The yellow had been replaced by a darker purple. We sat there quietly looking at each other.

“I see colours when people talk!” I blurted out. I have no idea why, but I just told him.

“I see,” said Dr. Menendez, now surrounded by a cloud of dark purple.

“You don’t believe me,” I said flatly. My own colours would have been brown fear and orange stress.

“I do,” he said. Light blue—liar, liar, pants on fire. “I just need you to explain what you mean.” Purple, really dark purple.

“Never mind.” I shook my head. “It’s not important.”

Maroon guilt with purple worry. “Lily, you thought it was important enough to tell me, so I’m pretty sure it is important. And you wanted me to know.” Pause, more purple. “So please, tell me what you mean.”

I shut my eyes, mainly so that I couldn’t concentrate and not see the tornado of colour swirling around his head. And to also stop my tears from flowing. “Since I woke up from the coma, I see colours when people talk. And, I think, the different colours mean different things—emotions.” I opened my eyes and looked at Dr. Menendez. “I’m not crazy.”

Still a bunch of purple haze hovering around his head. “I know you’re not crazy, Lily. You’ve suffered two very traumatic head injuries—one to the top of your brain which impact your cerebrum, the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe. And the one to the side of your brain when you landed on the curb, affecting your cerebellum and your brain stem. These are major parts of your brain. And as much as we know that you injured these parts of your brain, we don’t really know the outcome of the injuries and the subsequent healing.” He looked at me, silver shimmering all around him, telling me how frustrated he was with the situation. “When you cut your finger, the cut heals, but leaves a scar—the injury has healed, but your finger is not the same as it was before you cut it. Your brain is the same. We know you injured your brain. We know where, but don’t know what the scars in your brain are, or how they changed your brain.” I nodded. “The brain, Lily, is a mystery. And what has happened to your perception of the world is one of those mysteries.” A little less silver, and a bit of guilty maroon.

I sat with what he said. “So,” I said, “my seeing colours could actually be me seeing colours? Not me losing my mind?”

He smiled, maroon fading, faint yellow replacing it. “Yes,” he said.

So Dr. Menendez did what any self-respecting psychiatrist would do. He started studying me. When he asked me if I was interested in being the subject of his research, I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. Maybe with his help, I could figure out what was happening to me.

And we did. There were hella MRIs. It was like every week. I was afraid that I was going to start glowing in the dark. And cognitive tests to establish my baseline. And blah, blah, blah—test after test, after test.

Then we started trying to figure out what the different colours meant. There were days and days of blind tests. Dr. Menendez arranged to have me sit in on interviews and conversations between people. The catch was that they were conducted in another language, so that I didn’t have bias towards the stories. While I was watching people talking in different languages, I could still see the colours. If I could hear a person talk, I could see their colours. It didn’t matter what language they were speaking. That was how we figured out what each of the colours meant—correlating stories with colours. A blind test.

We also figured out something that, in hindsight, was a great big “phew” moment. I could only see colours if I was part of the conversation. So, no surreptitiously eavesdropping on conversations, and no seeing every colour, every minute I was awake. Can you imagine walking down a busy street being bombarded with all the colours of all the people? That would be unbearable. So no, my superpower only applied to those people I talked to. So, yay?

That also put me in an awkward position. Morally, should I tell people about the colours? Yes, because I was entering relationships with what some would consider an unfair advantage. No, because everyone would consider me a freak, and I’d have no friends.

Dr. Menendez told me it was my choice. I chose no.

So, I didn’t tell anyone. Not my mom, not my dad, not my brothers, not my grandmas, not my grandpa, not my cousins, not my aunts, not my uncles. And definitely, definitely not my friends. I told no one. The only people in the world who knew about the colours were Dr. Menendez and myself. Full stop.

*****

It’s been thirteen years since the accident, and I have gone on with my life. I still see Dr. Menendez every six months.

I earned a law degree and became a legal mediator. People tell me how intuitive I am—how I seem to always know what others are thinking. If they only knew.

Is it fair that I have this insight into the feelings of others? I don’t know. But was it fair that I got hit by a bus at seventeen?