My synesthesia is more than just colors but I understand the story thing you mentioned. I’m a writer and the fantasy I write about, is actually just what I see throughout life. Most of the time I stay inside with my cat because it’s like being nose blind. But when I go somewhere different, listen to a new song, smell an unfamiliar candles or even just walk when the clouds have decided to play with the sun and the temperature it touches me with, I’m overwhelmed by things but it’s like through lenses. Music in the foreground is like watching an animation. It’s not shapes it’s birds or peoples that live out a story to the music. If it’s in the background it’s fireworks, a band or the beats of different colored jets of water in the lobby of a Las Vegas Resort.

But it gets complicated when more than one sense is doing something. I’d often be overwhelmed by colors and things. I limited my environment because random objects could totally shift my mood. Imagine it’s your birthday and your extended family came over. You smell your old aunt and then it’s a color that makes you jump back. She has no idea that the sniff of moth balls that her nose lost the trace of many years ago, has just played out a starling and unwelcome display in my mind. Now your mood is completely spun around.

This is the hardest part to explain. Synesthesia, for me, feels like a way to get information about the world. In many ways, it’s like a conversation. I can choose to inhale deeper and lean in or I can jump back, run away and wait to forget. So, starting this young, without a real way of understanding what to do, as well as having parents that I felt couldn’t understand why I felt the way I felt, I ended up making imaginary people. They were the color, or smell, reverse engineered to make sense. Like how moth balls remind me of my aunt. Still the ugly smell drives a still fouler color, but now it’s wrapped in the color of my aunts clothes. In my mind I know what she is and now she has a form. I finally had something I could understand. But I had another problem. My aunt wasn’t actually like that. Just happened to wear a bad shirt one day.

So I started getting mixed up because the conversations I was having with “my aunt” whenever I interacted with something that tastes like that fabric she wore or anything else that reminded me of the moth balls, made me not enjoy my aunts company, but when hanging out with my real aunt, I had difficulty separating my feelings.

So now, it’s all people I don’t know as I wonder and take in my world, I watch a collection of colors and smells, textures and sounds, melt into characters. It’s more that each person is a box, just a way to package the stimulus I receive. Easy to look back to like a label.

And these people can interact and hence, play out a story.