No one saw the world the way that she did. A beautiful disaster chasing sunsets and snowflakes in a beat-up station wagon. Dancing on music notes no one else could hear, while melodies chased her heels like puppies. She lies on the sea banks, looking into the clouds, and see colors so rich she could paint with them. All she needed was a brush and a canvas big enough for all their beauty.

Her words come fast when she finally speaks, thoughts wrapping and twisting together like peppermint sticks. Her voice, a dizzying illusion of spinning speed, as you try desperately to chase the hems of her thoughts. She, in this moment, is a runaway train not even Jesse James could catch. Her highs soar so high that she can’t be seen, just a bird soaring over roaring waves waiting to crash. A rambling gypsy on a runaway train, chasing sunsets and dreams and art and snowflakes and poems and thoughts and promises and ideas that only she can see. Brilliant, deranged, chaotic, and yet focused on the sparkles, all hidden behind wild eyes and a mop of out-of-control curls.

We wait for her paintbrush to tumble from between her fingers and her world to turn gray. We know the time will come when things stop sparkling and the music will cease. There will be a day when she can’t see the sunset no matter how bright, and the snowflakes have melted. Her highs are the highest highs, but her lows sink to the deepest parts of the sea. We are left to wait, to pick up the pieces until she can see the sunset once more.

Society can’t see her colors, her sparkle. She isn’t eccentric in this world, she is crazy. I watch her bound through the sand in her paint-splattered skirt and flowered tank top. She is collecting driftwood and shells. She sees something the rest of us can’t see as she loads them into her box.

She is building something in that box, a collection, though no one knows of what. A cathedral of forgotten things, perhaps, she will build when we return home. A shrine she will create from the moments the world overlooked. Every shell, every splintered piece of driftwood is a memory, a puzzle only she remembers, a whisper of a voice only she heard. She turns them over in her hands like they are so fragile, pressing them to her cheek, listening to them breathe.

To her, they are alive. To her, in this moment, everything is. She can feel the sparkles today.

She told me once that broken things sing louder—they have a song that is just craving to be heard. That cracked wood and salt-stained glass carry the echoes of places they’ve been, of storms they’ve survived, of stories they crave to tell. Some carry their own story, while some are just a note. She puts them together in her art like a crafted symphony in a beautiful concert hall.

Her work has become famous, and yet I don’t think anyone really knows her songs. They can’t hear the music the way she does, but what they see is beautiful. What they see gives them just a moment of the sparkle that lives within her on those good days. They, of course, never see the gray.

She tells me that broken things sing louder. I have never heard them, but I believe her.

Her art is wild and unplanned, colors thrown like confetti, smeared like tears, scratched like survival. Her canvases are too small for what she holds, so they spill into sculptures and so much more. Her space is too small for her art. The world is too small.

There’s a restlessness in her that no place can hold, no person can anchor. She is always half-packed, always ready to run. Sometimes I think she’s chasing something she saw once in a dream, or maybe something she lost before she was born. A promise etched in the back of her mind that the world is more than what it seems. That if she just goes far enough, fast enough, bright enough—she’ll find it.

But I worry, too.

Because when the light leaves her eyes, it’s like watching the stars fall from the sky. Her brightness doesn’t fade gently, it vanishes, like a shooting star falling from the sky. One moment she is full of galaxies, the next she is just a girl curled in on herself, the silence louder than any noise the ears can hear. She will crumble and the world will turn gray.