The Synesthetic Wardrobe: Confessions of a Color-Control Freak

It was somewhere around the fourth grade when my brain decided to stop behaving like everyone else’s and start cross-wiring reality. That’s when the synesthesia kicked in—numbers, letters, and days of the week all came marching through my head in color. Seven was—and remains—a cool, mossy green. Nine was a deep ocean blue. The word “blue” itself conjured a train rumbling through fog. Monday wore brown. Tuesday shimmered blue. Wednesday glowed yellow, Thursday radiated purple, Friday blazed orange, Saturday burned red, and Sunday loomed black.

As a child, I treated this color cosmology as law. My wardrobe was a chromatic schedule: brown shirts on Mondays, blue on Tuesdays, yellow on Wednesdays, and so forth. God forbid I wore orange on a purple day—the cosmos would tilt, and I’d feel like I’d committed some moral atrocity.

Now, in my sixties, I’m marginally saner—or at least less obedient to my inner Pantone oracle. Still, the old anxiety returns when I defy the code. Wearing a red shirt on a blue day feels like cosmic vandalism, like spray-painting graffiti on my own psyche.

Synesthesia, it turns out, doesn’t just paint the world—it polices it. My mind demands harmony between the sensory and the symbolic. For instance, I can’t wear a blue-dial diver watch while eating spaghetti. The red sauce clashes with the blue dial, and somewhere in the back of my head a tiny conductor screams, “Dissonance!” So on pasta nights, I wear a black-dial watch. It’s the only way I can restore the illusion of homeostasis—a fragile détente between madness and order.