At eight, when I started playing piano, I saw music before I understood it. I didn’t memorize notes—I followed them as they unfolded into landscapes, shifting through shades and seasons. At twelve, Frédéric Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu was a fairytale I painted with my fingers.
Melodies moved in hues. I lived in color. Fantaisie-Impromptu’s fast opening section looked like a storm of dark blues—navy, indigo, and obsidian swirling together. When particular chords struck, silver and gold streaks flashed through this darkness like lightning. As the piece surrendered to its gentle middle passage, these golden filaments multiplied and strengthened, weaving through the receding blues.
I never knew where this came from. As a child concert pianist, I tried explaining it to teachers, to judges, to anyone who asked how I memorized music almost instantly by ear. After just two years, I was performing concertos, etudes, and sonatas. My grandparents called it my God-given gift. I only laughed, shaking my head because I didn’t believe in God.
I did, however, believe in the colors. Fantaisie-Impromptu was never just notes; it was another world I could step into, even without touching the keys. Later, I learned this had a name: synesthesia, the blending of senses, where sound became color, and music became shape. I experienced synesthesia while reading, solving math problems, in deep conversations. But at the piano, my synesthesia was the most vivid, the most alive.
By the time I was eighteen, I no longer spent hours at the piano. But I still listened when I couldn’t play. My childhood dream was to become a pianist, though practicality reshaped my path—a military scholarship and the pursuit of a physics degree took its place. My days were filled with problem sets and biophysics lab work instead of concert halls, yet music never left me. I listened to Chopin whenever I could.
***
My hands were gripping the handlebars of my white bike. New Haven hummed around me. Fantaisie-Impromptu played through my white earbuds, and I was inside it again as I pedaled. As a college freshman, living alone and working as a researcher for the first time, biking for groceries still felt like an adventure—not yet dulled by routine.
I lifted my head. The sky stretched, vast and vibrant, clouds suspended like weightless stones. I felt limitless—as infinite as the sky itself. Then, movement. A flicker of white in my periphery. The low rumble. The sound of an approaching car. I heard it, but I didn’t mind. My head was still in the clouds.
Then, an impression. Allegro agitato collapsed into Largo. The dark storm of chords softened into the bright sunlight of legato. My ears were still in Chopin. Then, speed. Too fast. Too close.
I swerved. Hard. The curb rose, my front tire caught, my body lifted. Suspended. Like the crest of a roller coaster, that impossible pause before the drop. A rush. A blur. Impact. Then, nothing.
Not ordinary darkness. Not just the lights flickering off or the dimming of dusk, but something deeper, darker. A void without shape or sensation. I moved—or thought I did—but the darkness moved with me, swallowing each motion before it could form.
Sound came in waves, thick and muffled like voices underwater. People were there, I could feel them—but I couldn’t understand them. I wanted to speak, to move. I willed my arms—but nothing. I screamed. I begged, first for my sight, then for anything that could anchor me. I was alone, but I could not bear to be alone. I needed something, someone, to hold on to. I found myself searching, reaching.
Finally, something held. Not a voice, not a form, but the sheer weight of my need had shaped into something solid. A presence, or just the absence of emptiness. I wasn’t certain. It did not comfort me. It did not answer me. But it did not leave. In my desperation, I called it God. Not as a light that found me in the dark, but as the only thing left when everything else had been stripped away.
For the first time in my life, I prayed. Not out of faith, but because it was all I had. Each prayer was a rung on a ladder I could not see. I pleaded with God, over and over—please let me see. Please, God. Please let me see again. Then, a shift.
A crack in the void. Light, but not ordinary light. Something raw, searing—consuming.
I opened my eyes. I tried to lift my hands, to shield my vision, but my arms didn’t move. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the light scalded through my eyelids, setting my brain on fire.
I blinked. The white light burned on. I tried to see something—anything—but there were no shapes, no contrast. Only shifting white, movement flickering at the edges of my awareness.
Then, contact. Hands pressing against me. Straps tightening across my chest. The wail of a siren. Voices, muffled at first, then sharpening.
“Ma’am… we’re here…”
I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to understand. Understanding meant this was real. And if this was real, then I could no longer see. Please, no. I refused to believe it. I chose to believe in the only thing I had left: God.
I pleaded. Help me. Help me see again. Please, God, please.
Then: tears. My tears. They sank into my skin, grounding me in a reality I wanted to reject. I cried as hard as I prayed, tears spilling. I wanted to hate God, but there was nothing to hate—only the light that burned and the darkness that devoured.
***
I returned home to Michigan to recover. I never finished the rest of my summer research fellowship. I didn’t even know how to begin that email to my professor: I know this sounds crazy, but you see, I was hit by a car…
Instead, I rested at home, staring at white. The ceiling. The flooring. Most of my time passed like this—motionless and emotionless—staring up at the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, which I had come to despise. My mind was as blank as the walls themselves. I didn’t think about God. I didn’t know how. I slipped back into how I lived most of my life—without Him. Then again, I didn’t know how to think about anything. I lay there. Hollow.
My sight returned in fragments. First in speckles, then in outlines, then in shifting shades of light. The blinding white softened until color seeped through. The pine trees outside my window appeared first as a ghostly silhouette. Then came pale green, before deepening into emerald. Still, the edges of my vision weren’t clear. Spots and splashes of white clung to my periphery, like stubborn clouds refusing to clear. Slowly, they dissipated. And after a little more than a month, my vision was restored.
Even after my vision returned, I had to wear sunglasses indoors. Fluorescent bulbs sent pains through my skull, pulsating into pounding migraines. Brightness made me recoil—I would flinch, sometimes even scream, but I learned to move fast, to cover my mouth, to pretend I was just coughing. Allergies, I’d explain.
I couldn’t stand the dark either. At night, it was too dark to relax, too dark to sleep. So I kept the lights on. All of them, at first. Then just a lamp. Then a nightlight.
I couldn’t fall asleep, yet somehow, I slept all day. Initially, I didn’t blame myself—I couldn’t move anyway. My arms trapped in casts, my body wrapped in bandages, my skin raw with deep road burns. My injuries gave me permission to stay in bed.
I barely showered: the water burned my gangrenes, scabs, cuts. Instead, I sat on a plastic stool and let the water ricochet off me. I couldn’t wash my hair. I let my scalp itch beneath the weight of greasy, unwashed hair. Days bled into weeks. I ate only popsicles: I couldn’t cook anymore, and eating off a stick was easier.
Time slipped through my fingers. I stayed in bed all day, all night. I only left the house for physical therapy. Hours of it. I hated moving that stupid little blue block back and forth, up and down, over and over. But I did it because I had to return to school in a few weeks—my military scholarship depended on my physical recovery. If I didn’t heal, I would lose my place at Yale.
I was tired of losing things. But I was more tired of trying not to lose them. My arms healed. Bandages came off. Slowly, painfully. Now, staring at bare skin, I no longer felt like I had permission to stay in bed. I still wore my sunglasses indoors, now explaining it as a fashion statement. My body had healed, but my mind had not learned how to leave the bed. My eyes had not learned how to see again.
After lying there for days post-recovery, I finally tried listening to music again. I’d come to hate silence. Silence was the loudest thing I had ever heard. So, I put on my white earbuds to quiet the noise. I listened to the pieces that once painted my world—Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Debussy. At last, I returned to Chopin.
I pressed play. I waited for my images, my colors, my stories to return. The way the notes used to burst into light.
Nothing. A new darkness. No. I had not closed my eyes. I didn’t just see darkness. I felt it. You could say God gave me back my sight. But did He take something greater?
I wanted to be grateful. But, deep down, I wasn’t. I’d lost my other sight—my synesthesia. I’d already given up on my childhood dream of being a pianist, but I had long made peace with this loss. Stepping away from the stage never meant stepping away from music. I still played. I still listened. I still saw. Until now.
Music had always been my anchor, but now, it had become both comfort and grief, refuge and reminder. I listened because I needed to. But I didn’t want to because listening hurt so much. The music remained, but the part of me I thought mattered most was gone.
***
A few weeks later, I went back to the piano, hoping—believing—that if I played, the colors would return. That the images would resurface. That the music would pull me back into my synesthetic world I had lost.
I lifted my fingers and positioned them on the keys. The muscle memory remained. The notes came easily. But they were just notes. I felt the keys, but I couldn’t feel the music. The imagery that once shaped my world, my memories, and myself was lost in darkness. I screamed. I cried.
My fingers formed fists, slamming against the black-and-white keys. Again and again. The echo rang. Over and over. I glared down at the damn black-and-white keys, before letting my body collapse onto the piano. All I wanted was color.
My desperation pulled me back to the presence I had first needed in the darkness. I pleaded again. Help me. Help me see again. Please, God, please. I don’t want to live in darkness. A part of me has already died there.
But the truth had already come to light. Everyone could see that my body had healed—I could walk, talk, and see. I looked healed. But how do you explain a loss that leaves no visible wounds?
Three years later, I still play Fantaisie-Impromptu. I have played it millions of times at this point. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. Each time, I believe—at least, I try to believe. Maybe this time, the colors will come to light and come to life. So now, I sit at my piano, staring at the black-and-white keys. I breathe in. I lift my fingers. I close my eyes.
