somewhere in the rainbow.

Seven numbers. That’s what he gave me.

“Give me a call tomorrow,” he said, grinding the cigarette butt into the sidewalk with his heel, “We’ll go grab dinner.”

I smiled.

“Need to hear my number again?”

“Nope,” I pointed to my forehead, pleased that my hand-eye coordination was still intact through all the vodka sodas, “It’s all here.”

He snorted and shook his head—obviously accepting being blown off. And maybe I was blowing him off, but I remembered the number.

“Well, when you ‘call,’” he said, using air-quotes, “Ask for Caleb.” He grinned wryly, and his dark eyes flashed in the streetlight.

I watched him walk into the night through a rainbow of colors.

“Navy, amber, aqua, vermillion, crimson, cerulean,” I sighed, and recited the final digit, “Lavender.”

--

My parents, the academics, were positively fascinated when I first told them how I learned my multiplication tables with such ease. I was six, and they thought I was some sort of math prodigy. But if it was possible, they were even more excited to learn that I didn’t see numbers with black and white clarity: I saw them in Technicolor. If not for their zeal over my education, I might not have even realized that I was different from other kids. Instead, I grew up as a synesthete.

Starting in high school, friends viewed me as a sort of party trick: Watch, Amber can tell you what color your birthday is. Watch, she can paint pictures with your phone number. Watch, she can solve equations with the color wheels inside her head. Watch how we can send her into fits of giggles by reciting the digits of pi.

I didn’t mind the attention. The world was beautiful. Learning—especially in my math and physics classes—was like playing in the most vast and novel park, and everything was glossed with a rainbow sheen.

I took psychology my first semester in college, and I happened to take the class with a professor, Dr. Alder, who was interested in my condition. He asked if I would be interested in being part of his experiments on synesthesia, and I couldn’t have been more excited if he asked me to solve the mysteries of nautilus shells or pine tree branches through calculations of light. For months, we teased apart the things that triggered the colors, and I was subjected to hours upon hours of psychical prisms. We discovered that if he wrote numbers on my palm with his finger, or showed me differently sized groups of dots, no hues appeared. But if he drew an 8, or spoke a 9, I saw the colors. And if he rattled off a string of digits, bouquets of colors sprung up in my mind’s eye.

Dr. Alder gave me a computer program to play with, one that psychologists use when they need to present numbers or letters or pictures very quickly. For example, someone discovered that if you show people an array of numbers or letters—say, 12 characters—for just a second, people can remember about 4. If you cut that down to three quarters of a second, people can still remember about 4. If you keep cutting that down all the way to less than a tenth of a second—barely long enough to even see—people can still remember 4 numbers.

Dr. Alder tested me with the program to see if I could remember more numbers that most people because of my condition, even if I was only shown them for a tiny fraction of a second. I could, because the colors were coherent to me. And I had so much fun in the lab that he gave me the program to play with on my own, with the stipulation that I would tell him if I found anything interesting in my self-experimentation.

--

It was during my experiments with Dr. Alder that I met Brian, a junior to my freshman. The first couple of times we met, we quizzed each other in the waiting room before our sessions about which colors we paired with which numbers. Malingerer, was implicit in every conversation.

But once we realized that we were really and truly similarly diseased with beauty, we started talking. We both loved psychology. We both loved arguing about the human experience, and the Kurzweilian conception of the singularity, and pretentious indie rock bands and which curry was the best curry. He was like me. We met for coffee. And then dinner. And hiking. And rock climbing. And skydiving. And watching Dexter on his couch and eating take-out from our favorite Thai place. And so many numbers.


--

The day after Caleb and the vodka was Saturday. I awoke to my cell phone ringing. The personalized tone sang: Orange-gold-plum-blood-blue-seafoam….orange-gold-plum-blood… My friends hated my ringtones, which to them were just long recitations of robotic digits. But for me, each ring was a personalized symphony of color that best captured the caller. I picked up.

“Hi Mom,” I said. My voice was scratchy, and I cleared my throat.

“Amber! Did I wake you?” sang her cheerful tone.

I glanced at the clock. Nearly noon. “Of course not,” I said, sitting up, and then immediately lying down again when the world started spinning, “Just have a sore throat. Bug going around.”

“Oh no! Drink some tea.”

“Will do. What’s up, Mom?”

There was a palpable hesitation. “Mom?”

“Well, we’re repainting the house!” Her cheeriness was forced now.

“That’s…great?” I said, now very alert. My mom was terrible at delivering bad news.

“And,” she stopped again.

“Mom?”

“Well, your Dad didn’t want me to tell you, but Brian sent something to the house for you.”

--

It was a frigid winter evening, and we had been together six (shiny, silvery purple) months. We drank our way through a bottle of tequila, and argued heatedly about the latest Wolf Parade album. I said the final track of the album was the best thing they had ever produced, and he said nothing would ever compare to “Modern World.” And we collapsed on the couch, and he was on top of me, and I was wrapping my legs around his. I was breathing through his mouth, and it was all the air I needed. He put his lips on my throat and kissed me deeply, and I closed my eyes.
“8,” he whispered into my neck, and the inside of my eyelids glowed a fiery red. He bit me gently, and pressed his hips into mine, and breathed “12,” and my mind blazed violet blue. I arched into him and gasped, “24, 2, 7.” He growled and pushed my skirt up, and I slid his pants out of the way, and we merged, frantically, sincerely.

He stayed on top of me for a moment, both of us heaving for breath.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.

He laughed. “Now?”

“Fuck yes. Now. I want the swings.”

We walked unsteadily from his apartment into the night and toward the public park two blocks away. The moon was little more than a sliver in the sky. It kept trying to hook racing clouds and get them to stay, but they slipped away, barely visible wraiths in dark cloaks. Even the clouds hurried to escape the cold on nights like this.

Icy wind raced past our cheeks as we pushed ourselves higher and higher in the swings, and finally we jumped off together, falling in the sod 10 feet away. He rolled on top of me and kissed me again.

I peered at his face, trying to make out his features in the darkness. Trying to see the bright green eyes behind his shaggy brown hair. Trying to see the smile I knew was there at this moment. My heart raced, and my lungs felt full to bursting, they were so full of exuberance for the swings and the lonely moon, trying to snag itself playmates, and this lovely boy, who could experience all of it with me in a way that I couldn’t with anyone else.
I whispered a number to him in the dark and he laughed softly, in the very seat of his chest. We counted the stars, pricking them with pigments.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too.”

“No,” I grabbed his face in my hands, “I mean I love you. I really, really love you.”

I tried to tell him how much I was feeling at that moment. How the world was just different that night. I’m sure it was partly thanks to the tequila. And I don’t remember exactly what he said after that, but when I woke up in the morning, I felt a residue of sadness in my chest, and tasted salt on my lips, and saw streaks on my cheeks when I checked myself in his bathroom mirror.

I was trying to slip on my clothes quietly when he woke up.

“Where are you going?” he asked, rubbing a hand through his hair, and looking like a sleepy, puffy wolf, just on the verge of regaining vigilance.

“Home.”

“Why?” Vigilance.

“You upset me.” I tried to make it sound as though it wasn’t a question, as though I already knew the answers. I was poking the wolves’ den.

He groaned and rolled over, letting his face fall into his pillow.

“Look,” said his muffled mouth, “You asked me to compare something I don’t have access to…to something I can’t articulate.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means… I don’t know how to compare your feelings to mine. So when you ask me if I ‘love you the same way you do,’ all I can do is make an educated guess. I don’t know.”

The memory flashed:

Do you love me?

Yes.

The way I love you?

I don’t know.

Why not?

Well…it seems like you might be more invested in me than I am in you. But I don’t know.

“I wasn’t asking you to solve a proof, Brian. I just wanted to know that I’m safe with you. Safe in loving you. Safe knowing that you love me just as much.”

The wolf rolled over on its back and stared at the ceiling. “Well, that’s what I’m saying, how am I supposed to know we love each other 'the same?'” Fuck your air-quotes, Brian.

“Jesus Christ, you just know, asshole!”

I stormed out of the room, found my shoes by his couch, and slammed the door of his apartment behind me, despite the “Amber!” I heard burst from his bedroom.

--

That was the first break up. We had two fights about the park, and in each, he insisted that he’d done nothing wrong, that I was asking him to perform a task that was scientifically impossible, and he seemed genuinely baffled as to why I was so upset. After a week, and ignoring many of his phone calls, he apologized. He loved me. Just as much as I loved him. More than he had loved anyone before. He wanted to plan a life with me. He bought me an antique necklace that I’d fawned over during a trip we took to an antique shop three hours out of town. I took him back, and I was happy.

But something changed after that night. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but in the months that followed, something was different between us. There was less time for color.

I stared into the spiraling branches of trees. I followed the delicate cloud systems, swirling above the world. They were bland. They were lifeless. They weren't relevant. They weren’t him. Weren’t us.

I became preoccupied with who had the “upper hand” in our relationship. It made me feel dirty. Disingenuous. In my lucid moments, I tried to remember what I’d felt that night in the park. The abandon with which I felt him, and told him how I felt him, how I felt the world with him. I knew that without that feeling, the world was over.

I decided that we needed to shake things up. We needed to remember novelty. We needed to see the world through each other again. Remember what it was to feel.

We went camping in the backwoods of Arkansas and slept under uncounted stars.

We got tattoos. He got numbers on his leg: his birthday and his parents' as well. He told me what colors they spelled. I got the infinity symbol on my back, and when we were in bed and it faced him, he would sometimes turn his head, up and to the side, up and to the side, making it turn into a golden 8, and then back to a plain black symbol, and then back to gold.

We saw Wolf Parade live, and we ran into the band in a bar after the show. We got autographs.

We had sex.

We had a lot of sex.

We drank. We drank a lot.

Three months after we got back together, he found out that he’d been accepted to grad school in robotics. In Japan. He would leave in 6 (an ironic lemon) months.

Immediately, my mind went to logistics. Maybe I could move there with him and find work. Maybe I could try to transfer and finish my undergraduate degree at the university there. Finally, I decided it was time to talk to him about what we could do, what we could plan on.

“Well…” he said slowly, when I broached the subject, “I guess I thought that I wouldn’t even get in at this place.” He coughed, and then his words came out in a constant stream, and his face betrayed nothing but rationality, “I guess I thought that we would be together as long as we could, as long as I was here, and then we’d go our separate ways when I moved.”

I found myself feeling something familiar. Something I had felt that morning after the park. Rage.

“Are you serious? You’re just ready to give up on this?”

“I’ve tried the long distance thing before, and I don’t want to do that.”

“Right.”

“Amber…you don’t know how hard it is.”

“I do, actually. But the point is that it never occurred to me to think about this as the end. It just felt like a barrier we would have to scramble over together. Together. The point is that we’re in the same place we were that night in the park. Once again, you’re telling me that I’m more ‘into this’ than you are.”

“Amber…”

“Get out. Get the fuck out of my apartment. And leave your goddamn key.”

“Amber!”

“Get. Out.” I hissed the last word.

That was the second break up. This time, he bought me a first edition of my favorite book on the golden ratio. He loved me. He was lost without me. He didn’t know how to live or function without me in his life. He wanted to figure out Japan together. He wanted it to be our experience, not his. He wanted to have a life with me. And I took him back because I was lost without him too. I didn’t know how to eat Thai without him. I couldn’t listen to any of my favorite albums because they reminded me of emotions that I had completely forgotten. I couldn’t stand the sight of stars. I couldn’t bear the world when its edges were so vibrantly painful. Even when we got back together, I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything anymore, because feeling good with him always reminded me what it was to feel pain without him.

And so we were together, and I didn’t have to feel anything. There was no more skydiving. And no more camping in fields and painting starry nights. And no more debating about Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes and who was the true poet. There was just the television and Thai food on the couch. There was just our skins grafting into one another, our bodies obediently carving out permanent indentions in one another.

The night after his graduation (that was the twelfth month, and it was the dark violet from the very bottom of a candle flame) was the third break up. I told him we’d been feeling distant, but what I meant was that I wished we felt closer. I asked if he was refusing to ask "why" when he knew I was upset because he didn’t see an endgame in comforting me with his departure fast approaching, but what I wanted was for him to show me his endgame in a tiny velvet-lined box.

But this break up was different than the first two. This time, we didn’t fight. This time, he agreed with the statements I made, and didn’t argue about the impossibility and the irrationality of my demands on his feelings. This time, I was just “right.” And in the days that followed, he didn’t show up at my apartment with a necklace, or a book, or tears, or an apology, or promises. With the threat of separation looming close anyway, he disappeared.

I kept waiting for my feeling to return—or more specifically, I waited for the day that I would break through the wall of hatred and betrayal I felt, and start feeling for the world again.

But my textbooks were still just black and white pages.

And the trees were still just dead twigs.

And the waves in my apartment pool weren’t mathematical patterns, waiting to be solved with mental paintbrushes.

Days passed. Then weeks. Then a month. Perhaps I felt lighter without the oppression of his detachment. I lost myself in books about psychology. I diagnosed him with sociopathy, and narcissistic personality disorder, and decided that he was avoidantly attached, and that his mother probably had something to do with it.

I spent time in coffee shops. Then I spent time in bars.
--

Mom sent Brian’s box to me the following Monday. As I walked back to my apartment from the post office, I wondered why he felt the need to mail it—he was still in town for another month. I decided that it was yet another sign of his dysfunctional attachment style. I tried to pity him. But all that existed in the Brian module of my mind was disgust.

I set the box down on my kitchen counter and stared at it. It was small. I wondered what it contained. Wondered if I wanted to know. Wondered if I should set it on fire. Wondered if it would be beautiful.

I cut into the tape, and carefully opened the top flaps. Inside, was a DVD of Pi I’d left at his apartment and forgotten about, and a pair of handcuffs that we’d never managed to work into our sex life. A note read: Thought you might want these things. Hope you’re doing well. Brian.

“Well.” I realized I had said it aloud. I said it again. “Well.”

That was it. Those were his last words to me.

I carefully placed both items back inside the box, closed it and retaped it. I retrieved the bottle of vodka from my freezer, and poured a shot. Then I poured another. Then another. Then I grabbed a sharpie and I started writing. 8. 5. 2. 1. 5. 6. 7. 8. A crescendo of colors flowed around the edges of my mind. More. Soon, the box was a whirling, heaving, kaleidoscope of ecstasy and pain. I wrote until the numbers overlapped and obscured each other. I wrote until the numbers weren’t there. The colors sputtered and slowly faded away, and I was in a dark apartment once more.
I poured another shot. I looked at the black box. I smiled. I even laughed. I poured another shot.

I opened my laptop. I started up the program that Dr. Alder had given me, the program in which I’d created so many games and tests for myself, learning all the different ways that I could use my colors to help me remember.

I started programming.

I programmed in The Fibonacci Sequence.

I coded screens upon screens of digits.

I programmed them to appear one at a time, slowly at first, and then faster, and then at an impossibly rapid pace, on a loop, forever.

I programmed. And then I pressed play, and leaned back into the soft back of my couch and watched the screen.

Lemon.

Gold.

Pumpkin.

Vermillion.

Pine. Navy. Sapphire. Violet. Lavender. Pink. Impossibly pink.

MagentaRedCrimsonMaroon

I was hyperventilating. I was flushed. The world that had been there just under my fingertips moments before was gone. The black box was gone. My apartment was gone. My living room was gone. The couch was gone. My clothes and my body were gone. Gravity was gone. Space and time were gone. I was gone. There was just light. Just color. Just warmth. Just ecstacy. Just love. Just transcendence.