Poetry Thursday, Synesthesia

Well, I thought I didn't have time, but since I'm writing a novel with a character who has Synesthesia, I really had no excuse not to post for Poetry Thursday. Some of you have read this before, the opening passages of the first draft (now trashed by the way):


She sensed it more than anything, the pulse, regulating existence. She couldn’t hear it at first, the regular thumping, the rhythmic beat, the pounding. It was purple, glistening violet, with a fuchsia lining. It was germinating, internalized. Liquid center, viscous, melting molten heat. Heartbeat, blood, the essence of the human form, the first recognition of awareness had a twitching effect on an infant Alina, her body and mind just recently introduced to one another. Rarely do people have more than a passing, fleeting memory of the first years of life, but Alina’s personal images of a sing-songy mobile over her head, marching band wooden bars on her crib, and a honey-flavored mother are branded deep, are fossilized into her bones, so that the taste of each memory lies thick upon her tongue.
She was sitting upon a velvety twinkling binky on the hardwood living room floor the first time she felt her heart thu-thudding, the first time she made it stop with a thought, stutter for a second, and watched the purple oval expand and contract. That’s how she saw it in her mind, a mauve shape of light and air with the movement of all life, sparkling with the energy of an electrical storm. But of course, she did not think “electrical storm”, because at one and a half she could not identify what was happening atmospherically the evening that she chose to come in to the world in the Arizona desert; she just knew the feeling of it, the dry prickly air, the sharp flashes. That’s what the heart held for her, before Alina had heard the word “heart”, long before she was taught about vessels and veins, and years prior to understanding what it means to have it broken.
While sitting upon that petunia-smelling blanket, Alina first understood that this sensation was inside her own body, not pounding out there, out beyond her skin; not over by the sink where her mother stood as tall as a giant. The water running from the tap was not beating like this interior source; it had another, string like quality, a silvery, high-pitched sound and a metallic smell. No, that water was not her heart, nor her blood, this other warmer sensation moving through her uncontrollable baby limbs. Her arms flailed and her vocal chords twittered at the discovery of definition, of boundaries.