She brings color with her when she comes – the world is brighter, fresher, newer, more vivid and alive. When she's walking across the courtyard of Djose, he doesn't see the same old dusty, broken bricks with color leeching out of them like a fading photograph. It's rich and clear again with every step she takes, like ink is welling up from beneath her feet, spreading slowly to the farthest reaches of the road, gradually filling in all the places that had faded to grey in her absence.

She talks in songs and poetry, smoothly and soothingly, her words slipping over one another like water over rocks, a bubbling stream of soft vowels and delicate consonants. And on occasion there's a sweet trill of laughter, or a breezy sigh – a dozen sounds so melodic and thoroughly enchanting that he cannot fathom how no one else seems to hear the music of her.

She's magic, pure and simple – from the way she slowly tips her head to one side, letting her braids spill over her shoulder in a silky, shiny fall that she knows he can't help but watch, to the way she gives him that quirky, lopsided grin when she's trying to get her way.

And he's never told her, but he's sure she knows she's got him wrapped around her little finger. She can twist him into knots with a sigh and melt him into a puddle with a look, and she practices her special brand of magic on him every chance she gets.

He thinks everything about her is charming and irresistible, from her quick temper, right down to her regrettable clumsiness – which often sends her tumbling to the floor on her backside, and him into gales of laughter. And even as she's lamenting her own lack of coordination, she's chastising him with that musical voice for laughing about it.

And he wants to tell her – even if she takes the occasional tumble, he's never really thought of her as clumsy or uncoordinated.

After all, to him, she's poetry in motion.