Not a Fan (Wilbur Soot)

Backtracking

"No, it's okay. Well, my voice doesn't actually have a color... Anymore." Her words were slow, her eyes fixed on the keys. She already knew the next question before he asked. 

"Anymore?" Yep. There it was. 

"How much do you know about synesthesia?" She deflected, giving herself as much time as she could to post pone talking about this. 

"I only know what you've told me. I mean, I googled it, but I didn't really understand anything." Wilbur admitted. He must've felt her tension rising, squeezing her hand before interlocking their fingers.

"Synesthesia is basically a misfiring in the brain, causing multiple areas of the brain to be activated by the same stimulus. Like, normally sound is just sound to people, but for me is visual and audial. For people with other types of synesthesia, sounds might have a taste to them, or words have a smell associated with them. Does that make sense?" Aurora asked, looking over to him for the first time. 

"Yeah?" Wilbur answered hesitantly. Aurora knew he wasn't on the same page, but she continued anyway. 

"Okay, so, a lot of different things can change the way our brain is wired. Like, an example is there's this study about learned helplessness. Basically it showed how if you put someone in a position where they can't succeed for long enough, even if you switch it so they could succeed, they won't even try. They've learned that no matter what they do, they lose. So, they just stop trying. The researchers who did this study looked at normal brains and compared them to these brains with learned helplessness and saw that they were different. That kind of opened the door for how life experiences can change the make up of our brains." Aurora rambled, shaking both of their hands as she explained, trying to talk with her hands. 

"So your brain has learned helplessness?" Wilbur questioned after a moment of silence. Yeah, they weren't on the same page. At this point, they might not even be in the same book. 

"What? No, no. Sorry. I'm just rambling because I haven't talked to anyone about this before." Aurora apologized, finally dropping their hands back into her lap. Wilbur rubbed small circles onto her thumb, giving her the encouragement she needed. 

"That's okay, take your time." His words were sweet and gentle.

"Another thing that changes our brain is trauma. So, um, well.." Aurora started, shifting on the bench. She wished they had moved to the couch before starting this conversation. "When my dad died, I stopped hearing colors." She finished, letting the air out of her lungs slowly.

The weight on the conversation hung in the air, the silence occasionally interrupted by the sounds of city life below.

"I know you explained that our brains can change, but how does that change your synesthesia?" Wilbur finally questioned. 

"Oh, um. The misfiring that causes it in the first place basically gets interrupted. Like the places where they used to go aren't there anymore, because the brain's composition is different. When the firing can't be completed, I can't see the colors when I hear. Our brains can heal though, returning to some level of what they once were when we're not in survival mode anymore." Aurora explained, somehow feeling calmer now that she had spent more time explaining the brain and less about her trauma.

"So where are you at?" Wilbur asked, placing another hand atop hers, like he knew this would be a difficult question for her. 

"Well, after a while, the colors came back. My mom's voice was the first to come back. It's a really bright red, can't miss it. Um, then I noticed that most of the colors were there again, they were just really soft and hazy, nothing like they were before. After a while, it was almost like everything was back to normal. Everything except me. My voice's color just, never came back. I did as much research as you can, but the only thing that I was able to find said that not everything comes back. So, yeah. My voice is colorless." Aurora finished, the tears already stinging against her shut eyelids.