Shoe gazing

It was as if the whole world was blooming around her, everything was changing, everything was moving and growing, melting into each other, sparking against one another, exploding, vaporising. Colours spilled out of everything and bled into the air like wounds of yellow, ash, teal, scarlet, apricot, sapphire, blush, lavender, maroon, aquamarine, sienna, canary and cerulean, melting into one another like a bizarre ocean, pouring out of every opening in every tiny space. Emotion and memory solidified around her into crystals and diamonds, encasing her in a transparent coral of things she had forgotten long ago and had left like footsteps on a dirt path. Her past clung to her hair like snowflakes falling in winter and melted away into nothing but water. Flowers burst open and filled the air with so many smells and colours, like spices from far off lands, carried by breezes that whistled through her fingers like a spirit of the forests. Soil dried and cracked, and birds that had been trapped underground for a thousand years emerged, pale and sunlight starved, spreading their frail wings and flying up into the black velvet sky The grass grew and buds burst, sap ran down the trunks of trees, glistening, hot and sweet, which ran into the rivers and oceans and turned them into gold lakes, that rippled and danced with phosphorescence from the cold, newly polished moon. Stars rained from the sky like tiny grains of cosmic sugar, and caught on her eyelashes and lips. It was sweet and bitter, like a sudden realisation, and clustered on the ground and crunched when she walked. It glittered and shimmered, like billions of tiny fragments of mirror and salt. The whole world was cracking and melting and freeing itself from reality,

But she didn't see it.
She was too busy staring at her shoes.