I have superpowers!

Well, maybe not but I have a 3D visual image of time. The year has a general shape of an oval, but a rather crooked one. The long ends are in July and December. I am standing at late December (20-ish), but if I want to see November and December my perspective changes like I'm standing between September and October. Some months are thin, some are thick. January, February, and March are thin months, then it gets thicker in the summer months April to July. It thins a bit in August and September and early October, then mid-October is thick again til mid-December and then it starts to thin again for January. I also have colors for the months, although some are not so defined. January is like grayish blue, February is pinkish, May is dark blue, August is brown-red, September is pale yellow, October is red-orange, November is yellow-orange, the rest of the months are difficult to describe in terms of color.

The years are lined up in like a tape (or ribbon) and some parts are bent in different directions. Some are bending towards me (1989 and 1990), away from me (1970's), sideways to the left with flat side facing the right (1990-1997), sideways to the right (1900's down), upwards 2001-2003), some are twisted (1999), etc.

The weeks are like walls. I view it from the top of the wall looking down at Monday at the beginning of the week. At midweek, I am below Wednesday looking up. At Friday, I am standing beside Sunday looking at the days approaching me.

I didn't know that this is actually a mental condition that has a name (time-space synaesthesia) until yesterday when I followed an ad in Facebook saying "Do you see the year as a loop...?". I have tried explaining this to other people before but nobody really related to me so I got really excited when I saw the ad. I thought this is just my way of remembering events, but I found out that there are actually people like me (but not that many).

This probably is related to my exceptional talent at remembering birthdays. True, I still remember the birthdays of my classmates in elementary (some I haven't seen in 10+ years) because I can see them standing at their birth month in my loop. And maybe this is also related to my very vivid childhood memories. There are scenes in my childhood (even as young as 2 years old) that I can still remember with great detail (like a video). The farthest memory is that of a scene outside my mother's office where I was with another child and he was holding a blue toy gun and his yaya was holding his right arm. The child threw the toy gun and I picked it up. It was morning and the daisies were in bloom. I can't really remember what age I was but I still can barely walk and I had a hard time picking up the toy gun. But the irony is that I am very forgetful of things to do for the day, my keys and other things to bring and sometimes I forget what I said or what I intended to do just moments ago.

I also noticed that I'm better than others at remembering past lessons even without studying, which is why I always do great with achievement and entrance tests (but not much with class rankings). For example, I was the only one who got in the top 10 of the college entrance of VSU (then ViSCA) from our high school batch but I was only no. 9 when I graduated. Those who ranked better than me at graduation didn't make it to the top 10 in the entrance exam for college. Similar happened in the DOST scholarship exam, high school entrance exam, ACES exam, et. This is because the questions were mostly from old lessons. I also have a knack for history as long as I have read about it.

I probably got this ability from my father. He's like me. He can tell us about his very young years with great detail yet he often forget his keys. I will ask him if he can see the years or months too when I go home (maybe in March).

I meant to blog about my memory long time ago but I got lazy. What really triggered this very long post is finding out that there are people like me (who can "see" time) whom I can relate to and that there's not too many of us. So, if you came across my this post and you're like me too, please do comment. Thanks.