When I’m manic the world feels so unbelievably beautiful and shattered. And there is just such sobering, overpowering ecstasy in this awe-cracked brokenness that I can’t help but feel it throbbing in my bones.

The sadness settles in the cradle of my heart, as I’m the only one charged with saving this beautiful broken melancholic bundle that leaves scorch marks in my chest.

I cannot sleep because I have to stand guard all night. I am the lonely, lovely littered watchtower.

I smile and I cry and I collapse and I laugh myself back into beautiful space. I’m b u r s t i n g with bright colors and sweet agony. I am brilliant and tortured. I’m too bright to burn out.

It feels like a hypnotic ultra violet jelly fish has curled inside me, I’m warmed and distracted with its beautiful electricity as she wraps her stinging fingers around my soft lungs and a heart that is eager to feel a jolt that brings me back to life. I can smell the singed skin.

On nights like these I turn off the lights and watch two videos from my childhood. “The Snowman” is a short video based off a book written by a man whose wife had schizophrenia, a crazy girl just like me.

But the video has no words just pencil drawn landscapes, skies, and the rolling ocean. It stars a little boy who builds a snowman, loves him into life, and then loses him to the sun.

There is one song sung by a choir boy, who growing up I thought was a girl like me, and the lyrics that are seared forever in my mind cry to me, “We’re walking in the air. We’re floating in the moonlit sky. The people far below are sleeping as we fly. I’m holding very tight, I’m riding in the midnight blue. I’m finding I can fly so high above with you.”

And I can’t stop watching this video and I can’t stop crying over the sheer splendor of this story. Loving and losing and escaping into the sky as people rest peacefully beneath you and I cry so hard with such indulgence that my chest aches. This is my story too. Little Me learned that sometimes sadness can bring immeasurable beauty with its sorrow.

I watch a scene from “Dumbo” again and again and again because I cry so hard I think I feel God.

His mother is locked up, shackles on her feet, but she weaves her trunk through prison bars and cradles her son. The bittersweet lullaby plays as she rocks Dumbo, “Baby mine, don’t you cry — baby mine, dry your eyes — rest your head close to my heart — never to part, baby of mine” and I cry with my entire body.

And it feels so sumptuously beautiful that I start to die.

I stare at the screen and wipe the tears from my neck and I clasp my hands as my head pounds with violent angel wings, “may God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in!” From the lips of Mother Theresa’s passed on to mine to echo in God’s ear.

All this rapture rips me right open. I just can’t keep the k a l e i d o s c o p e in and I find markers and pens and I decorate my pale arms and soft stomach, my freckled face and long legs, and my pink chest that is absolutely pleading.

I’m covered in colors.

I turn into canvas.

I listen to sad lullabies and I think of this rickety world. And I am honored to hold such euphoria, since I am simply a crazy girl lost in divine light, even though this splendor makes me suffer.

I cry until the markers run, leaving diluted tentacles etched across my skin and I sit on my kitchen floor feeling blessed with my burden. This grief makes me whole; it feels familiar in a way I deserve.

I sit and the tears pour out and I pull my knees to my chest because I’m exquisitely splintered and responsible for the entire world’s torment.

And I would sit and cry and make my colors run forever but my husband says it is time to see the doctor.