Sound-Touch Synesthesia

Last Wednesday

My mother is full of silly parables.
"Eating the butt of a chicken makes you beautiful."
"Where ever you go, there you are."
“A minute on the lips, forever on the hips.”
She also makes THE greatest black bean soup.
One of her favorites is something along the lines of, "At the gates of Heaven, the angels count how many showers you’ve had, and if you don't have at least one per day they send you to the very back of the line.”
It's my favorite, too. It's so silly. As a kid I'd always laugh it off whenever she said that, but I'd secretly shower three times in a day whenever I was feeling superstitious. To me, everything my mother said was written in stone.

I couldn’t even open my eyes it was so intense.
“We should totally go for a joyride right now!”
Rhonni was absentmindedly strumming something complicated on her mandolin.
I took slow, deliberate breaths.
“Nottttt too sure I can walk right now, let alone drive.” I spoke quietly as I laid sprawled out across the carpet of her bedroom.
“I’ll drive. No biggie! C’mon, you’re gonna love this!”
I stood and my body went into tiny waves of convulsion – sort of like the sound a toy accordion makes, but with sharper edges.
Blindly, I stumbled down two flights of stairs and struggled with the handle on her old blue truck. The corners of my mouth were forced upwards into a perpetual grin that was beginning to sting.
As Rhonni drove I felt the essence of my body evaporate delicately, as if I was a bottle of expensive whiskey smashed against hot concrete.
My colors were even brighter and heavier than usual. They pressed against my chest and seeped down into my nervous system, leaving all five of my senses muddled and my mind completely clear.
“Get ready to dance.”
That was all she said before she blasted the single most incredible song I have ever heard.
I could feel the bass line spiraling within me; a thick iron coil leisurely rotating in time with the harmony.
The guitar’s strings sliced through the muscles of my back and shot out from under my fingernail beds.
The piano’s ivory keys sat gently on top of my stomach like my mother’s favorite ceramic casserole dish.
“Do you feel this?!” is all I could manage to say. I kept yelling it to her over and over again. My voice a deep, silky shade of eggplant that wrapped around my ears like satin sheets.
“Holy shit! Ho-ly shit!” was her response – I assumed that was a yes.
My body lurched and shook as it danced like the women who flail about and curse in tongues at church services.
I cried tears of absolute bliss while my heart stuttered and faltered like a new born colt that can’t quite stand on its own.
My spine was a braid of tightly woven wicker that crackled and creaked as I moved; the music’s notes flipping and bouncing within my ribs like cold silver medallions.
All of my thoughts, worries, and consciousness slammed into the back of my skull as I pried my eyelids open for the first time in what felt like hours.
I was on all fours, kneeling next to Rhonni’s truck on the side of the interstate as I vomited bits of burning, salty leaves.
God, I miss my mom.