For most of my life I thought it was normal that Vladimir Nabokov's name was always ink-blue and ivory, that A is a lipstick-scarlet letter, that the word
opium
is the color of a pomegranate and
N
was the same brown as the word
November
. That a song could smell like tobacco and vetiver and bitter orange, a taste so thick that you could feel it smeared across your tongue. I thought that everyone saw…