If I have long been accustomed to having a very good visual memory, I now seem to have a far more acute case of synesthesia.
Pain is coloured. The constant companion ache comes in shades of violet, turning more greenish as the ache grows deeper and wider. The variable pain which is dazing and mutable comes in shades of orange, from a peach blush to a harsh neon, almost (confusingly) blinding. Shades of graphite grey are a sanctuary from riotous colourful pain, perhaps.
But, more importantly, the act of drawing something conjures its presence, be it fur or feathers, dry cracked paint, bark, thorns or hair on skin. The better the drawing the more acutely I can feel it under my finger tips. Tis a curious sensation, with seeing and feeling merging to become the self-same thing. This is new. Where before there was a huge gap between the looking and the act of the drawing that needed to be bridged, all calculated, grafted for, now touch, sight and motion are melded when a drawing is going well. But it only works with pencils. A seamless extension of the hand, no need to worry about replacing caps or some such thing. The immediacy of application, the lack of hesitancy, the reassurance of erasability, all contribute to a Thing which springs from a place where feeling and seeing become indistinguishable from one another.
Maybe it's some compensatory equivalent to going blind and having better hearing, that the correlation of being forced to be so aware of the body (hell, some days now I can feel each individual vertebra) is a heightened ability to feel other things in curious ways.
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