"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
prologue
Jasper Red, for all of his life, has seen the world in an astray of music; sound dancing against the air in vibrant colors and flashes of dark reds and bright blues and soothing yellows.
Greens were his favorite.
Ever since he could remember, green has been there for him. In sparks of mint that twists around his tapping fingers, in a deep pine from his bouncing leg, a soft lime flowing from his guitar strings, a dark and distracting emerald that burst from his earbuds when he needed to get away from the world.
His mother's eyes, his father's voice, his twin's smile and older sisters' same laugh, the colors of his walls and the peaceful feeling that sprouted in his chest whenever he walked through the woods and stopped against an old oak tree to just feel.
When he was seven, Jazz was diagnosed with Synesthesia-- he could see and feel sound and with his introception synesthesia, often described as silver breathing and green tiredness, he could see different emotions as colors. He had the rarest form as well, lexile-gustatory, that let him taste certain words and sounds.
It made him... different
Different in a way that wasn't always noticeable; he'd blank out or get lost to the feeling of a noise or go blind as a certain sound surrounded him. He'd compliment the color of someone's voice or complain about the way his professor's voice was too bright to look at but no one understood.
Green was safe.
Green didn't have to be told; green was there and it knew what happened.
It was there to comfort him when no one else knew how.
Even if he got a migraine from how bright the sound seemed that day, even when he tripped over his own feet because the sound ricocheting from the concrete didn't let him see where he was going, even when he was so tired of the world and so drowned into the dark blues and draining grays it was there.
Green was in every song; all music and echoed from every string or drum. Music was there for him just as much-- it let him control the sounds, it let him mash and mush and make symphonies with sounds and colors.
Some days, his music was all he had.
Other days, he was luckier. Other days he could downplay the frustration that his synesthesia created and pretended to be normal. Pretended his world wasn't dancing and flashing in all the sounds and colors around him.
Today was one of those days where he didn't have to pretend.
He was officially moving into his dorm room, even though all his boxes had been dropped off there and the paperwork had been done for weeks, and his parents came with him to see him off.
Jazz was grateful for that; he loved his family and since Dela, his twin, had an important soccer practice she needed to be at and his other two older sisters were already off in their own colleges and busy with their partners and lives, it was nice to at least have his Papa and Goddess mama with him.
Though, it would have been better if he couldn't tell that his papa was flirting with his mama from his place on Pickles, his motorcycle, while they were in their car.
But he grew up overhearing his parents flirt-- gross-- and around his siblings who, like him, picked up on the vulgar and rather amorous vocabulary. Eh, that was the worst thing his parents ever did so he was a genuinely lucky dude.
YOU ARE READING
Jazz Red's Anomaly
Romance"I am the textbook definition of in love with you." *** Jazz Red has had a life full of love; his parents taught him how to value himself, his siblings taught him how to stand up for what he believed in, and his family has taught him what it means t...
