LIFE OF KYLIE

The sky overhead was clear and bright, but Kylie’s dull, heavy countenance had a dimming, dulling, obliterative effect that somehow made this day, like every other day, seem flat and grey. 

It was just the two of them that afternoon, Kylie and Mariam, shuffling in slow, extravagant Figure-8 formations across the expanse of Kylie’s driveway. 

Sometimes it struck Kylie as sad that she had no one else to perform this futile ritual with except for her longtime housekeeper; and sometimes it struck her as sadder still that the essential nullity of her life had come to manifest itself in such a staggeringly literal form: pacing, pacing, pacing the flattened mobius strip of her existence, churning absence into yet more nothingness. 

But then, the latest bi-weekly cash infusion would arrive - extravagant, impossible-seeming amounts of money, enough to make anyone forget anything for at least a few days. And Kylie’s Pimp-Mother, giddy and high on the latest, ever-more baroque schemes for monetizing Kylie’s likeness, and indeed, her life itself, would remind Kylie that it was all for something, and reassure her that IT - if not she - mattered. 

The one upside to the surfeit of money and time that Kylie now enjoyed was that it afforded her the means to indulge her passion for Gulf War memorabilia. 

For as long as she could remember, Kylie had been obsessed with modern warfare. Though it was impossible to say definitively, many of the private arms dealers with whom she had developed warm and familiar relationships privately assured her that her collection of armored vehicles was among the largest and most complete in the country.

Her latest acquisition, a matte black titanium model she had taken to calling “Black Velvet” had been delivered that morning, and it was, without a doubt, the new centerpiece of her collection. 

On this day, as she and Mariam performed their endless, plodding death march that lacked the comparatively sweet conclusion of annihilation, on each pass, Kylie would run her fingers appraisingly and approvingly over Black Velvet’s hood and front fenders. For a few hours, this new bauble bought her something of the psychic calm she had been seeking, but as the hours progressed, this feeling, indeed, all feeling, began to flee. And by the time the sun had reached its midday apex overhead, Kylie was back to the routine agony of a great nothing-at-all. 

“Hey Mariam?” Kylie called out.

“Yes, Miss Kylie?” Mariam replied.

“I’m bored. Let’s role play” Kylie suggested. 

“Oh yes, Miss Kylie! That sounds wonderful!” Mariam gushed. Unbidden, Mariam continued:

“What if I’m a famous and beautiful celebrity, and you’re my housekeeper?” she ventured.

“Sounds implausible.” Kylie replied.

“Well, what if you play a human trafficker who’s finally been brought to justice, and I’m the judge presiding over your sentencing at International Criminal Court?

“Sounds stupid” Kylie replied.

“How about this:” Mariam continued “What if I’m a princess, and you’re an evil witch holding me captive in a tall, tall castle on the edge of a mountain, and one day, under mysterious circumstances, you plummet to your death from the window of my turret cell?” Mariam ventured.

“Honestly Mariam, you suck at this game” Kylie replied, tartly.

“I guess I’ll just have to do everything myself, LIKE USUAL.”

Kylie set down her tiny purse, which had nothing in it, on the hood of her military grade SUV, which had no engine or drivetrain in it. And as she gazed upon these two hollow artifacts, Kylie momentarily felt something very much like compassion for herself that this was what her life had amounted to: a pointless, gilded vessel, denied it’s one true purpose - denied ANY true purpose - there for no other reason but to be gazed upon, a mute, dumb pawn in the machinations of someone else’s ego.

But this feeling soon dissipated, and Kylie returned to matter at hand.

“Okay. So, like, it’s the VERY FIRST NIGHT of the Shock and Awe Campaign, and your apartment has just been like, totally blown up or whatever. Everyone is your family is dead, but somehow you survived. But like, your legs are totally mangled, or like, gone or something. So you’re like, crawling along the ground, trying to get out from under the piles of smoldering rubble, and you’re screaming for help, but no one can hear you over the sounds of the bombs and the anti-aircraft artillery fire. But finally you manage to get out, and you’re crawling down the street, or like, whatever’s left of the street, and then finally you look up, and you see it: there, amongst the wreckage, standing tall and proud and completely undamaged…is the statue of Saddam.”Kylie widened her stance and and thrust her shoulders back, assuming a very convincing likeness of the late President.

As Kylie outlined this scenario, Mariam contemplated interjecting: to tell Kylie what it was like to have actually lived through that; to try and describe the sleepless nights spent watching the night sky erupt periodically into hellfire, summoning all of your strength to will it there and not here, knowing all the while, that if your wish is granted, someone just like you will be the cost; to explain what it was like to lose everything - truly everything - and lack even the most basic of recompense; and finally, to describe what it was like to be made aware that one’s own life is truly and completely indistinct, and that all anyone’s life amounts to, no matter the circumstances, is a brutish struggle for survival, a struggle that we all, eventually, will lose. 

But instead, she just flattened herself low to the ground and began to play out Kylie’s elaborate fantasy with a commendable verisimilitude. 

At a certain point, Mariam paused, and looked up at Kylie. 

“Oh Miss Kylie! This is such a lovely angle of you!” Mariam gushed before reaching for her phone and taking a quick burst of shots. She then proffered her phone for Kylie’s appraisal, her hand extended upwards in the manner of some sad seeker reaching out to touch the hem of His garment, but falling tragically short.

“SO Cute. Perfect.” Kylie agreed.

“Yes Miss Kylie. Perfect. Just perfect.” Mariam concurred.

And with that, Mariam collapsed back on to the hard, hot driveway, and pressed her face firmly against the stone pavers, and gazed up at the arid, ochre Calabasas hills, and the large, black armored vehicle foregrounding them. And for a moment, if only fleetingly, it was almost as though she was back in Baghdad. And indeed, sometimes, she wished she was. ⧫

“Hey mama” Kourtney called out, her now-standard greeting for her youngest sister.

Kylie felt more than slightly annoyed at the obliterative nature of this monicker - as though the fact of her motherhood disallowed or superseded any other positively-defined qualities. She was sure Kourtney’s intentions were innocuous enough, but it was starting to wear on Kylie; every time they saw eachother  all the “hey mama!” this and “hey mama!” that further corroded the last remnants of whatever fragile enamel of personhood Kylie had managed to preserve. And though she considered raising her objections, somehow she could never quite find the right way to broach the subject, and so she just replied:

“Hey mama.”

“So, like, how amazing is it to be a mom?” Kourtney inquired, in what sounded like a leading question, but was actually just a straightforward request for some quantification, purely for interest’s sake.

“Like, SO amazing” Kylie replied “It’s like….” Kylie trailed off, searching for the right word “…EVERYTHING.” 

Strictly speaking, the word she had been searching for was one that could convey a great, beige, directionless expanse, where change is constitutionally impossible. But for now, “everything” would have to suffice.

“Yeah, it’s like…definitely everything” Kourtney concurred, similarly unable to think of any word that could capture the sheer vastness of the nullity at the core of her existence.

Neither one of them knew how to continue the exchange after that and a long silence ensued. It would have been awkward had either of them been even slightly less afflicted by a totalizing apathy that left them emotionally supine, but they weren’t, so it wasn’t.

It was Kourtney who, after who knows how much time, finally interrupted the staggering silence:

“You know, I was just thinking: I’m like, actually old enough to be your mother…how crazy is that?” she ventured.

“You’re like, SO random right now” Kylie replied

“But, like, if you really stop and think about it, it totally could have happened…I was like, 18 when you were born…” Kourtney pressed, with a strange and uncharacteristic insistence. 

“You’re like, SO random right now” Kylie reiterated, venturing - but failing - to sound doubly as emphatic.

“Okay, but like, I’m just saying that someone my age COULD have given birth to you. Like, it would be TECHNICALLY possible.” Kourtney insisted. 

“That would like, honestly never happen” Kylie countered, feeling strangely destabilized by Kourtney’s apparently innocuous hypothetical ramblings.

“Yah” Kourtney allowed “Okay, but like, what if….” Kourtney trailed off momentarily before continuing:

“…WHAT IF: it was December of 1996, and, like, SOME 17 year-old - let’s call her ‘Karen’ - was planning to go to her winter formal, and for the first time ever, the school administration at Marymount decided to organize it as a co-ed dance with the boys at Loyola, and this super cute boy - let’s call him ‘Greg’ -  asked Karen to the dance! And everyone was surprised, because even though Karen was, like, definitely hot and popular, somehow she had just never attracted THAT KIND of attention from boys - definitely not from a boy like Greg. 

But, like, it gets more complicated because it turns out that Karen’s more conventionally pretty but like, honestly, also kind of dumb and boring younger sister - let’s call her Kandice - was ALSO super into Greg, and EVERYONE was SURE that he was going to ask HER out! But, like, as it turns out, Greg was SUPER INTO Karen all along! Which was, like, obviously SO humiliating for Kandice because she had kind of low-key lied, and told everyone at school that her and Greg were, like, already boyfriend and girlfriend, even though they had only met once.

Anyways, Kandice was, like, super bent out of shape about the whole thing, and went behind Karen’s back and tried to give Greg a handjob at the Grove one day after school, but Greg was like “what are you doing Kandice??? You’re such a SLUT!” Which was true. She was a slut! And then Greg totally called up Karen immediately to tell her what had happened, because he figured that even if Karen was like, super pissed off and never wanted to talk to him again, it was the right thing to do. Which it was. But luckily, Karen was super hot and chill about the whole thing, and knew that her sister was a dumb whore who needed that kind of attention, so she immediately forgave Greg, and in a funny way, it drew them closer together. And then in the days leading up to the dance, they started hanging out every afternoon after school, just like, chilling and talking, and it was all bright, and new, and perfect. 

And then by the time the night of the formal came around, Greg and Karen were already basically a couple, but neither one of them felt the need to announce it as such, because in a funny way, it almost would have sullied the special, precious thing they had, calling it by such a common name. But still, it was nice to be thought of as a couple, and neither Greg nor Karen did anything to dissuade anyone, or to dispel the chatter. 

And they had a wonderful time at the dance; it was so fun, and easy, and natural, and they of spent the whole night dancing together, but because there was an implicit trust between them, they could also both drift and mingle and just know that they would eventually, organically, come back to one another. 

And then, after the dance, when all of their friends were dispersing and going home, Karen and Greg weren’t quite ready to let the night end, so they decided to go for a walk. And even though neither one of them had had a sip of alcohol - unlike Kandice who was wasted and had to be picked up and taken home early by their housekeeper - they both kind of felt a little drunk, and kept stumbling into one another, loose, silly, giddy, and free. 

When they got to the tennis courts, they decided to lay down and watch the night sky, which was clear and bright in a way that it almost never is in LA. All the stars were shining that night, and the intimacy between them felt so small, and so precious, yet at the same time as enormous, transcendent, and infinite as the whole universe before them. And as they lay there, their hands started to search each other’s bodies; not aggressively, not lustfully: tenderly; with care, kindness, and joyful curiosity.

And as they continued to explore and touch and feel things that neither one of them had ever felt before, eventually they both found themselves naked, there on the tennis court, but there was no shame, no hesitation, no discomfort at all. And Karen rolled over on to her side, turning her back Greg, and Greg immediately pressed himself up against Karen, and pulled her close, and just held her like that, tighter and more fiercely than she had ever been held before.

And they stayed like that for a long time, until finally Karen shifted her hips and leaned more emphatically into Greg: just slightly, but deliberately - knowing what would happen. And then, it happened. It was warm and perfect, and more than anything, it was just nice to have discovered this new way to be close. And even though it was over pretty quickly, and it definitely wasn’t the best, mechanically speaking, in a funny way, Karen never had another encounter more satisfying - in the sense of being wholly life-affirming - than that one. There was something in the purity, and simplicity, and completeness of their connection that night that Karen would never really find again.

But then, about, three or four weeks later, Karen still hadn’t gotten her period and she was all like “FUCK” so she and her best girlfriends got into her electric blue Jeep Wrangler and drove to the pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test, and then went back to Karen’s house to take it, and well…Karen was pregnant. 

So obviously she totally freaked out. She had just been accepted to Southern Methodist University, or, uhh, some university, for example, and it was the last semester of her senior year, and this would just ruin everything. Karen didn’t know what to do, but she knew that there was only one person she could turn to for help: her mother - let’s call her ‘Kerri’.

So Karen immediately goes down to her mom’s home office, but, like, Kerri’s on the phone, as usual - something with the IRS, but Karen never did find out what exactly it was pertaining to. So eventually Kerri hangs up the phone, and without even lifting her head from the paperwork on her desk, she just kind of beckons Karen into the room in that weird, dismissive way that powerful people do when they’ve been made aware of your presence, but their time is so strictly meted out, that they can’t fully focus on you until the exact moment, and for the precise duration that they’ve allotted to you.

Anyways, Karen just stood there, holding the positive pregnancy test, trembling, violently now. Finally, Kerri looked up from her paperwork and the semi-circular array of blinking pagers, arrayed on her desk and she immediately saw what was in Karen’s hands. 

“Oh Karen. Oh no. No no no! Please tell me this is a joke…Karen. This is a joke right? You wouldn’t do this to me would you?? Right Karen??? KAREN!!!! FUCKING ANSWER YOUR MOTHER!!!!!!!!” Kerri screamed as she stood up out of her seat, slammed her fists down on the table, and in one swift, clean motion, pushed the entire contents of her desk to the ground - including her brand new Compaq Presario desktop computer, which sputtered and whirred, almost loudly enough to drown out Kerri’s guttural wails, but not quite.

“Mom I’m sorry!!!” Karen pleaded “I never meant for this to happen, but I just, like, don’t know what to do, and I know you must be so so so disappointed in me right now, but I just, like, really need your help; I really need my mom…”

Unmoved, Kerri screamed back “you KNEW Bryce and I have been trying to get pregnant again!!! How could you do this to me??? What’s wrong with you????? You selfish, unloving little BITCH!!!!!!!!” Kerri raged. 

“Wait, what?” Karen replied “You’re not angry because I got pregnant? You’re angry because I got pregnant INSTEAD of you???”

“It’s the FUCKING NINETIES Karen: no one gives a SHIT about someone’s teenage SLUT daughter. But do you know what they DO give a shit about KAREN??? FUCKING HUMILIATING AND MALIGNING GORGEOUS, YOUTHFUL, VIT-AL WOMEN IN THEIR EARLY FUCKING FORTIES!!! THEY give a shit about calling these women BARREN, SEXLESS, AND FUCKING MENOPAUSAL!!!!! THEY give a shit about PUTTING THEM OUT TO FUCKING PASTURE THE FUCKING SECOND THEY’RE NO LONGER UNI-FUCKING-VERSALLY FUCKABLE!!!!!!! Well FUCK. THAT. Karen - I’m not going to let that happen to me; I’m not going to let YOU do THAT to ME.”

“Uh, well, uh, what are we going to do???” Karen inquired, unsettled by her mother’s considerable though not entirely uncharacteristic rage.

“Well Karen, I’m going to make it REALLY FUCKING SIMPLE for you” Kerri announced “I’m going to tell you what YOU’RE going to do, and then I’m going to tell you what I’M going to do. And then we’re both going to FUCKING DO WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO, OKAY KAREN???”

“Okay…” Karen replied.

“So what YOU’RE going to do, KAREN, is you’re going to get on a FUCKING PLANE tomorrow and go on a “last minute exchange to Europe that was just TOO good to pass up!” And what I’M going to do, KAREN, the second your sad, sorry, pregnant ass is on SAID PLANE, is call up all of my FUCKING BEST FRIENDS AND FAMILY to tell them the HAPPIEST FUCKING NEWS that Bryce and I are expecting our second child together in as many years!!! FUCKING YAY FOR ME, KAREN. FUCK. And then, KAREN, about 8 months from now, you’ll come back to LA, VERY FUCKING DISCREETLY, because even though you were ABSOLUTELY LOVING Europe, you just couldn’t BEAR the thought of not being there for this PRECIOUS FUCKING FAMILY MOMENT. And then OH!!! WOULDN’T YOU FUCKING KNOW IT, KAREN, the second you arrive at the hospital - again, VERY FUCKING DISCREETLY - your BELOVED FUCKING MOTHER will give birth to your BEAUTIFUL NEW BABY SISTER, oh, I DON’T KNOW, let’s FUCKING CALL HER KYRA. So how does that sound, KAREN? Do you think you can FUCKING DO THAT? Because from where I’m sitting” - an inapt turn of phrase given that Kerri’s chair had been violently overturned in the course of her rage, and she had been standing, powerfully astride, for the duration of her monologue - “I don’t really think that you have many other, or uhhhhhhhh, SCRATCH THAT, KAREN: ANY OTHER FUCKING OPTIONS.”

“Okay” Karen immediately acquiesced. 

---

And so that’s what they did.” Kourtney stated, concluding this vast, sprawling for-instance, that she had sketched out, purely for arguments’ sake.

A long pause ensued where both Kourtney and Kylie pored over the contours of this hypothetical scenario, searching for something - anything - to add. 

Kourtney was the first to pierce the silence:

“So I mean, like, yah: WHAT IF something like that had happened?”

“Yah I dunno; I mean, I guess it, like, COULD have happened like that…” Kylie replied. 

“But, like, I dunno: Karen just kinda sounds like - no offense, I know she’s a friend of yours or whatever - a Dumb Whore.”

Kourtney paused to consider this characterization.

“Well, she kinda is. But God bless her anyways.” ⧫

“Hey Kylie?” Kylie’s friend, Ana called out, as she stared off into the sunset. The golden glow illuminated her face and lent her an otherworldly aspect, almost as though she herself was the source of light, which, in the sense of being a relentlessly positive, uplifting and selfless individual, she was. Staring out at the perfect expanse of beauty beyond, it seemed to Ana that life had worked out so much better than she ever could have imagined, and she had a sense of having reached some kind of pinnacle in her life. And though she acknowledged that she may never ascend higher than where she was at this moment, the mere fact of reaching this place, and this state so early on brought even more happiness, and an even richer sense of solace. Her skin tingled with a perfect warmth, and though it may have just been the warmth of the sun, to Ana, it felt like an internal warmth, emanating from the certainty deep within that she was exactly where she was meant to be. 

“Yeah?” Kylie replied, as she stared off into the inky depths of the black door behind her. She wondered where this door might lead? What realms it might contain? What might become of her were she to open it and venture forth into the unknown? That it was the front door of her own house from which she had just emerged did nothing to arrest her curiosity or to stanch the great flow of hypotheticals that washed over her. In the glossy black finish of the door, she could make out her own reflection - but only somewhat. This blurred, gauzy, out-of-focus rendering, striated with the insistent brushstrokes of some careless, unskilled, rage-filled workman accorded with her prevailing self image, and she found she couldn’t look away. And if only for a moment, she seemed somehow to merge with and dissolve into this dim, streaky rendition of herself in a way that almost felt comforting, if not still a little painful. 

“You gotta check out this sunset. It’s, like, so gorg’” Ana advised. Truth be told, Ana wasn’t much concerned with sharing this experience with Kylie, but she simply didn’t know what else to say. They had been standing there by the front door in complete silence for what felt like a measure of time beyond measure. Kylie had that effect on her, and on everyone else: where time seemed to slow to a crawl…or perhaps it became suspended…or perhaps it simply stopped altogether? There was really no instructive metaphor that could help to describe, much less account for the experience of being with Kylie, which is why Ana, like everyone else forced into her company, attempted to blunt the mounting terror and stave off the inevitable oblivion with cheery, absent-minded banalities. And just when it seemed that she had reached a nadir that had to be final and absolute - commenting on things that were of so little importance that she felt certain that no one, anywhere, at any time had ever thought to comment on them - Kylie would somehow find a way to steer the exchange in a direction that was orders of magnitude more banal. And whatever firm footing Ana had thought she had found down in these despairing depths would give way, and an even more terrorizing existential vertigo would grip her as they tumbled together down, down, down; always ever further down. 

“SO gorg’” Kylie lied in response. She hadn’t turned to see the sunset at all. And if she had, she would have found it, like everything else in her life, to be so effectively close to nothing as to be impossible to remark upon, except, of course, to parrot back the preceding statement in a slightly different inflection. What could possibly be said, with any sincerity or depth of feeling, about something that was perceived as less than nothing-at-all? “SOOO gorg’” Kylie repeated for emphasis. 

“You’re not even looking at it!” Ana chastened Kylie, imagining for a moment that if only she could elicit some positively identifiable emotion in Kylie - fear, rage, sadness…anything, really -that she might be able to break through to the real person who she - incorrectly - assumed slumbered somewhere deep inside. 

“Yes I am” Kylie again lied, this time just a little more emphatically. It was subtle, but somehow the conviction in her tone had already began to erode Ana’s confidence in her own perception of things. If a lifetime of being gaslighted by her family for sport had taught Kylie anything, it was just how easily and swiftly most people’s grasp of reality could be dismantled. In general, repeating the same lie only three times was sufficient to undermine any normal degree of conviction in the truth, and create the baseline of plausibility for the deception. 

“No. You’re not. You’re looking at the door.” Ana rebutted, her resolve still tentatively intact, though crumbling rapidly. 

“No. I’m looking at the sunset” Kylie insisted. She had realized long ago that an uncontested lie is functionally the same as the truth, and in some senses, even better. People tend to want to remember the truth vividly and emphatically, teasing out its nuances over and over again. But lies: lies they want to forget as quickly as possible, permitting the passage of not-that-much-time-at-all to smooth out the many folds of deception into something that is, if not positively true, then at least not positively untrue.

“Okay…well, like, then, why don’t you tell me what it looks like?” Ana challenged, imagining that she would catch Kylie off guard with this unexpected request. But what she failed to remember was that Kylie enjoyed an evocative, deeply imagistic command of language that permitted her to render scenes so vividly and so full of feeling that the actual characteristics of what she was describing always yielded to the lush emotional landscape that she was able to conjure with her words, and whether what she was describing was real or not always became an entirely secondary consideration. 

“Well…” Kylie began, still looking intensely at the black door behind her and emphatically avoiding even the slightest, most fleeting glimpse of the sunset before her “I see a great, wide dome of the palest blue: so light, it’s almost not there at all; so clear that it’s almost colorless…but it isn’t white, it’s just…pure. And all around are clouds, so saturated with the most intense pink imaginable that it’s impossible to think that they’re not actually colored that way; impossible to truly comprehend that by some exquisite trick of nature, they’ve just temporarily taken on this hue. And they’re so low in the sky, and so near-seeming that you find yourself wanting to grab out to them - not to covet, because it would be painful to be in possession of something so perfect, but to simply make some passing connection with them, and by extension, with the Divine. And if you could reach them, if you could touch them for even a fleeting instant, what you would feel would be a kind of unity and totality that would defy comprehension, but somehow, the knowledge of which would become embedded within you, surer and truer than anything you’ve ever known. As your eye travels down, nearer to the sun itself, the whole sky seems ablaze: but it’s nothing like the erratic, consumptive, destructive force of a fire - on the contrary, it seems gentle, encompassing, generative, and…complete. And in the foreground, against all of this, you see the dark, though not yet blackened outlines of the hilltops reaching up to try and establish communion with all of this glory. You feel at one with the earth: so grounded, and yet, so relentlessly striving, and you’re struck by the understanding that there is no understanding - only presence; only feeling; only love. Then, as the sun slides behind the highest peak of the tallest hill, somehow, the afterglow is so much richer, and so much more intense than what has just preceded it, and any sadness that you might feel at this ending, is entirely mollified by the supreme, overriding assurance that all of this is for you, and of you: then, now, always. 

“Omigawd Kylie…that was…incredible.” Ana stammered, truly taken aback by the power of Kylie’s words that somehow, impossibly, had succeeded in making all of this so much more real, and so much more perfect than it already - manifestly - was. 

“Well, it’s an incredible sunset” Kylie replied, even though all she had seen, and all she could ever see, and all she would ever see was blackness. Blackness here, blackness there; blackness near; blackness far; blackness all around, cloaking and choking her, slowing seeping inside of her, only to meet yet more identical blackness emanating from within. And all of this blackness was so emphatic, so energized, so completely bracing and piercing that it could almost be described as radiant - except that it couldn’t, because it was just blackness. 

“Seriously Kylie…you should be like, a writer or something!” Ana gushed. 

“Ew. Gross. No.” Kylie growled, thinking disdainfully on that kind of life: inconsequential, lacking, and marked by an extreme paucity in every respect except vanity and self-regard. 

“But let’s take a selfie” Kylie offered. “We look SO FUCKING HOT right now.” ⧫

It had started as a simple enough suggestion —

“Why don’t you take up gardening, Kylie?” a well meaning acquaintance had suggested, noticing with some concern how thoroughly disconnected Kylie seemed from her life, from herself, from, well, everything.

“Maybe a nice little vegetable patch, where you can grow your own fresh food?”

“I hate food” Kylie replied.

“Well what about putting up a greenhouse and tending to orchids, or something like that?” the friend ventured. 

“Ugh. I’d probably just end up picking off all of the blooms and massaging them into a fine paste with my bare hands until my fingers and palms were bloodied and raw and then my own blood would begin to mix in and act as a binding agent but also lend a soft pink hue to the whole compound. Or something.” Kylie lamented.

“Well, what about something lower maintenance? You could just stake out a small plot of land out back and plant something that would essentially take care of itself but that you could admire from afar?” The friend suggested, in a last ditch attempt to save Kylie from herself. If this wasn’t successful, they’d have to walk away from this toxic dynamic for good. Already, they were so close to not caring at all, they sometimes wondered if it was just the financial incentives that kept them coming around? It was.

“Like, what kind of things?” Kylie inquired

“Well, maybe daisies?”

“Too precious.”

“Or lavender?”

“With my allergies?”

“Or sunflowers?”

“Hmmmmm” Kylie mused aloud, signaling some degree of interest. “Yah. Sunflowers. Okay. I’m like, literally obsessed with this idea.”

And indeed she was. She began by staking out a 30-foot by 30-foot plot, but it looked altogether too diminutive, so she quickly doubled it to a 60-foot by 60-foot area which somehow looked even smaller to Kylie, and even though she measured and remeasured it, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some unseen malevolent force looming over her entire life whose only, sick pleasure lay in the systematic dismantling of her hold on reality. But what - or who -could that possibly be?

“Oh hi sweetie!” Kris, Kylie’s mother waved from across the low fence that separated their two adjacent properties. She was so lucky to have family close by.

At any rate, she wasn’t satisfied with any of the square configurations, so she began to experiment with rectangles, parallelograms, and eight-pointed stars: some of which she liked, some of which she loved, some of which she hated with a virulence that she had never felt before, and even though this hatred was a negative emotion, it was still something that she could positively define in the vast fog of un-sensation that was her existence, and so she clung to it fiercely.

But these rectangular shapes and Islamic iconography ultimately proved to be too limiting and undifferentiated, so she moved on to considerably more fecund territory of gently curving amoeboid shapes. She would quickly trace out random curvilinear forms with her finger in the air, then rely on her gardener to replicate it on the ground using wooden stakes and string. Of course something was always lost in translation. 

Just when it seemed like Kylie would never be able to hit upon the right configuration for her sunflower patch, she had a radical idea that at once simplified the whole endeavor and made it infinitely more complex: the sunflowers should just be everywhere. 

She could see it so clearly in her mind’s eye: a vast expanse of yellow, so dense and so thick that you could scarcely even move through it. Or if you tried to, you’d trip and stumble and fall to the ground, and then once you regained consciousness, you’d look up, trying to figure out where you are, but all you’d see was green and brown and yellow, and you’d just sink back down into the cool, damp earth and wonder how it all came to this, all the while knowing that it never could have been any different. 

Kylie even ordered the driveway torn up to make even more space for her sunflower field. At first, she had tried to wield the jackhammer herself, but she lacked the upper body strength to control it, so one of the more cocksure young men on the demolition crew came over and embraced her from behind, grabbed her hands with his, and took control of her movements as one would with a marionette, or a woman pretending to like golf for your benefit on a mediocre fifth date that represents the inflection point between spending the rest of your lives together in a passionless but functioning marriage, or returning to being strangers who ought never to have met in the first. Kylie didn’t give verbal consent to JP to assume this position behind her, but she didn’t have to: her body yielded to him in a delicious, emphatic, unmistakable “yes” as the heavy, jerking vibrations reverberated throughout her body and she became lost in a haze of destruction and desire and particulate matter. 

“What are you going to do with all of your cars, Kylie?” a different well-meaning acquaintances inquired one day, as the demolition of the driveway was nearing completion and workers were hauling away large chunks of concrete to Kris’s house next door for an undisclosed application in her blast shelter.

“Uhhh, like, honestly…I don’t even know. Probably just like, take them down to the junkyard and toss them in the compactor?” Kylie replied. “I mean, not toss, toss, of course; I guess maybe a forklift would smash through the windows or the side body panels with its prongs and pick it up and drive it over to the compactor, then kind of just like shake it loose or something? I honestly don’t know how it would work, but you definitely couldn’t just ‘toss’ it in. God! The English language is so funny sometimes…” Kylie mused. 

“You’re honestly going to just throw out all of your cars???” this acquaintance screamed “some of them are worth half a million fucking dollars!!!!!!!!”

“Yah, but like, I don’t have the space for them anymore, and like, I don’t want them, so like, what else would I do with them?” Kylie countered.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???? Uhhhhh SELL THEM? Give them away?? Donate them the fuck to charity???” The acquaintance raged. 

“Omigawd. Like so much effing workkkkk…I can’t even. Do YOU like, want them or something?” Kylie offered

“Uh, oh wow; uh sure; yeah; yes!!!” The acquaintance quickly accepted.

“Okay; cool. Just like, give me a dollar and I’ll transfer the deeds to you - I’m a notary now; fun fact” Kylie replied before continuing:

“Now, the clutch is a little sticky on the Lambo, so you might just want to sell that one for parts. But like, the Ferraris are all in perfect condition, and like honestly SO GOOD for just like running errands and whatever. The Rollie and the Maybach are like, not that fun to drive, but like, amazing for being driven in, you know? So like, that’s something anyways. And like, the G-Wagon’s pretty good off-road, but the handling and suspension of the Range Rover is like kind of unbeatable. Oh, and like, someone gave me a Tesla I think? But it’s parked over at Khloé’s house, and like, you have to download this app to use it or whatever and it’s just like, who can be bothered, right? But like, if you have the time or whatever, it’s all yours.”

With a new home secured for her fleet of cars, the demolition of the driveway could proceed apace, and within a few days, it was complete. And all around her house, the earth was being freshly tilled in anticipation of what was to come.

To help complete the sowing process, Kylie poached several dozen workers from a nearby blueberry farm with the promise of unlimited draft beer, free, fast Wi-Fi, and a complimentary consultation with a lawyer from the ACLU, who was actually just Kylie’s friend Holly, fresh off a two-episode arc on ‘NCIS’ where she had played a mute court stenographer. 

It took the Seasonal Guest Laborers about two days to finish everything. Kylie felt certain that they were slacking, but then again, she had no real frame of reference for how long something like this should take, so she just had to take it in good faith that everyone was showing up with the intention of doing their best work. They were certainly thorough, Kylie had to admit: every square inch of the property was blanketed in sunflower seeds by the end of the second day.

After they had all left, Kylie took a walk around her property. With each step, she tamped down a few more seeds into the damp, freshly irrigated earth, and the thought that she was hastening their eventual sprouting and blossoming was almost nice, and she felt almost good. And as she continued to walk, she began to imagine the final result: a sea of yellow surrounding her house, as far as the eye could see, practically boundless in its reach.

She imagined what it would be like to go out walking, in and amongst the sunflowers once they had reached their full maturation: each one so tall; so much taller than her.

She imagined the sense of perfect disorientation that would come with being surrounded on all sides, unable to make out anything at all in the midst of the dense crush of foliage, almost being choked out of existence. Even the sky above would be almost completely obscured to her, though occasionally she would catch the tiniest dapples of blue as the leaves danced and played in the wind, and she would wonder what that strange color was, and what realm it belonged to. But then she would return her gaze downward, and immediately she would forget about that strange color, and what it might signify. And then, the possibility of ever knowing another place than this, much less beholding it, much less actually being there sloughed off, right back into impossibility. 

She imagined pausing at one sunflower in particular: perhaps one of the weaker looking ones with a thin stalk and a slightly anemic coloration, whose leaves were insect-bitten and brown, and whose petals that beginning to wither and curl and take on a crisp, almost papery texture. She imagined pushing on it - not for long, and without much force - until it yielded. Then she would push some more until she heard that decisive cracking sound and felt a tearing sensation as the fibers of the stalk frayed and the plant relented for good. At last, Kylie would step on its bloom and with her heel, and grind it fiercely into the ground until it was nothing more than mulch, indistinguishable from any of the other debris that would briefly accumulate before decomposing and returning to the earth. 

Out there, among the sunflowers, no one would ever find her. After she had been gone for a while - possibly hours, but most likely days - perhaps someone would begin to wonder where she had gone, and they would venture tentatively out to the edge of the field and call out: “Kylie! Kylie!!” Kylie!!!” She would hear their cries and then make herself very still, and lie very low, until their calls, and indeed all sounds had ceased; until she could be completely sure that everyone who had been looking for her, and everyone who might ever look for her had given up their search. In truth, it wouldn’t be many, and their resolve would quickly wane: it’s difficult, after all, to look for something that you don’t really want to find. 

She would stay there, just like that, until the sun went down, and all the sunflowers bowed their heads to the east in anticipation of the new day. And she would press herself closer to the ground - into the ground, if she could have mustered the necessary force - in anticipation of nothing at all.

Eventually, as seasons changed, all of the sunflowers would begin to wither and wilt and slump and finally, die. And all that would be left would be a sea of limp, denuded stalks: a testament to the severe frailty of life, and a reminder that beauty of any kind is never anyone’s to keep for long. 

And perhaps one day, someone from within what used to be Kylie’s house, but was now a real home filled with life and love and family, would look out, and they would see her, wandering in and amongst this great wasteland. And even from a distance the two of them would lock eyes, and somehow, without any words at all, they would be able to see the truth of one another.

And this person inside the house - this deserving, valued and valuable person who had known at least something of love, and happiness, and solace - would, in that moment, be reminded of the strange story they had once heard about the sad life of this sad young woman who planted all of these sunflowers so many years ago. And not knowing what they were looking at, not believing that it could be real, or that it could possibly be her, they would blink their eyes closed, and count: 1-2-3-4-5. Then they would open their eyes again and look out: but there would be nothing there.

Kylie would be gone. As if she had ever been there at all. ⧫

Inasmuch as she was capable of feeling anything, Kylie could feel the warmth of the sun beating down upon her; and inasmuch as she was capable of feeling anything good, it felt nice. 

The rate of change in her life this past year had been immense, and the opportunity to take a few day’s reprieve from the demands of her life was a welcome one indeed. Away from the harsh glare of fame’s spotlight; away from her many and multiplying professional obligations; away from her mother’s smothering love that Kylie was beginning to suspect might not be love at all…Sadism was such an ugly word, but then again, the most apt way of putting something was so often the least palatable.

At any rate, it was nice to get away, just the three of them: Kylie, her partner Travis, and baby Stormi. It was the first trip they had all taken together, and though Kylie was still in the process of disentangling her notions of family from the seesaw of exploitation and neglect that she had always known as such, on balance, she was grateful to be a part of this new, little unit. 

Still, a pervasive loneliness seemed to stalk Kylie, and even after having sought out and nominally achieved the greatest types of intimacy and connection that anyone could ever hope to experience, she still felt fundamentally isolated. Even together, she was still apart.

It couldn’t have possibly helped that the unique circumstances of her life permitted, and in many cases, necessitated a degree of remove from the general population that was, by any measure, extreme. This beach, for example, should have been, and normally would have been full of many hundreds of other people, but Kylie had bowed to the concerns around her privacy and security and rented out the entire resort for the duration of their stay.

If Kylie had been capable of conceiving of her life as anything other than a Baroque symphony of abuse, she might have noted the great paradox that the very notoriety that connected her abstractly to so many millions of people, was the same thing that left her utterly bereft of human contact at the scale of her own life. But as it was, the only thought in Kylie’s mind was, as usual, no thought at all - just the familiar, obliterative, psychic white noise that after all of these years, had become the closest thing to comfort she would ever know. 

As Kylie lay there, she stared out at the beach beyond. For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing, and no one, save for a few empty lounge chairs and an unfurled umbrella. She supposed that it was thoughtful for the staff to have set those out for their use, but in that moment, the presence of the extra chairs only amplified her sense of isolation, only reminded her of what she could have had - or perhaps what she should have had - and she was quite convinced that it was intended to be a slight. 

As she continued to gaze out at the emptiness before her, she began to imagine another set of circumstances, one in which this beach was full people, full of lives being lived, full of strangers, each one of them every bit as full of the potential for joy and sorrow and love and heartbreak and everything that Kylie herself was. And in this other set of circumstances, she wouldn’t be rich, or famous, or anything at all except for herself: just Kylie.

Perhaps, in this other life, she could have known happiness - uncomplicated, complete happiness?

Perhaps, in this other life, she could have known peace - benign, untrammeled peace?

Perhaps, in this other life, she could have known love - free and full expressions of love, both given and received?

Perhaps, in this other life, she would have come down to this very resort with three of her very best girlfriends, Morgan, Leah, and Shay?

Perhaps all four of them worked together at a certain kind of establishment that catered to a certain kind of gentleman who was inclined to make his gratitude for a certain kind of hospitality known - on no uncertain terms?

Perhaps Meghan was quietly growing resentful of the Leah and Shay’s outsized earning power owing to the ‘twin factor’, and perhaps she considered their extreme willingness to capitalize off of that to be unseemly, and unsportsmanlike? 

Perhaps Meghan had said as much the night before, after a poorly-worded comment on a seemingly unrelated matter had revealed much more than she had intended?

Perhaps Leah had demanded to know ‘what she meant by that???’ and perhaps Shay had echoed her sister’s line of inquiry and muttered something that was inaudible but almost certainly a vulgar and uncharitable likening of Meghan to a certain part of her own anatomy?

Perhaps that slight had liberated Meghan to finally unburden herself of what she really thought of Leah and Shay, and in the midst of that, found an opportunity to remind them that they still owed her $170 each for that AirBnB from five months ago?

Perhaps Shay, the most volatile of the three, upon being accused of performing certain complex and intrusive penetrative acts for foodstuffs would have marched over to Meghan and thrown a punch, but perhaps Meghan would have ducked out of the way, sending Shay careening forward, landing face-first on the concrete pool deck?

Perhaps from her vantage point, to Leah, this would have looked like Meghan had deliberately tripped her sister, and perhaps this perceived malfeasance would cause her to lunge at Meghan, and begin to pummel her from behind, scratching, biting and pulling at her hair?

Perhaps Meghan would tap into a heretofore unknown rage, grabbing Leah by the throat and guiding her steadily backwards until she was pressed up against the outdoor pizza oven, flailing and kicking and gasping for air?

Perhaps Shay, having recovered from her stumble would come charging at Meghan from behind and violently pry her off of her sister (and not a moment too soon)?

Perhaps Meghan and Shay would then fall to the ground, and in the course of rolling and tumbling across the pool deck, the ties of their bikini tops and bottoms would become loosened and eventually altogether undone, leaving them both completely nude, contorting themselves into indescribable indecency - even by the standards of their profession?

Perhaps Leah, having had a moment to catch her breath and recover, would then come rushing to her sister’s defense, just as her sister had come to hers, but not before also stripping down to the nude, for no reason other than force of habit?

Perhaps at a certain point, their extravagant melee would begin to feel like something else, and all of their rage would somehow melt into a gentler expression of passions, and a different kind of animal impulse would overtake them all?

Perhaps what they had been identifying as animus between them had been something else all along, something far less sinister, and perhaps it had taken all of this for them to discover the truth of what existed between the three of them, there, by the pool, under the cool blue light of the Caribbean moon?

And perhaps Kylie would have missed all of this, having gone to bed at 10, exhausted from the long day of travel that had preceded?

And perhaps, the next day at the beach, she would pick up on some strange dynamic that she couldn’t quite identify, but which decisively excluded her?

And perhaps in very short order, one by one, Meghan, Leah, and Shay would all get up and excuse themselves, contriving of various excuses, but insisting - emphatically to the point of anger - that Kylie stay there at the beach?

And perhaps Kylie would assume it was something she had done, or hadn’t done, or could have done, or should have done, and she would bear it all silently, knowing that her best chance at acceptance, now, or ever, was to diminish herself to as little as possible, rendering her presence a minimally tolerable non-event?

And perhaps, once again, Kylie would find herself all alone, laying on her side, staring over at two empty loungers and at the beach beyond, imagining all the great potential of a life that she would never know?

And perhaps then, with a familiar isolation asserting itself once more, she would idly reach out her hand, and imagine what it would be like for someone - anyone - to be there to grab it; to be there to affirm her existence; to be there at all?

Perhaps; perhaps; perhaps. ⧫

“OMIGAWD. Aren’t we like, SUCH twinsies right now???” Kim inquired, trying, as ever, to spread around some of the obscene good fortune that had been so overwhelmingly allotted to her and so thoroughly denied to every other member of her family; trying, as ever, to make them feel something of the supreme self-assuredness that she had so naturally and so completely enjoyed for as long as she could remember - with only a scant few temporary and entirely circumstantial interruptions ever blemishing the pristine expanse of perfect self-love; trying, as ever, to remind her sisters that they were deserving, unique, vital, and dynamic, and that if only they could locate and highlight those traits, they too would find for themselves a world free of limitations, and a life overabundant with goodness. It was, of course, a fool’s errand, all these well-meaning lies, but Kim was committed - almost irrationally so - to dredging up the rest of her family from the muck of low expectations and even lower potential. 

“Not unless “twinsies” is some euphemism for a benign yet still parasitic protuberance” Kylie thought to herself. Like a skin tag in some out-of-the-way place that could go undetected for years, until one day an acquaintance points it out, and you’d look at it with curiosity, knowing that it was a part of you, and that it was sustained by you, yet all the same, you would be utterly unaffected by its presence beyond some mild annoyance and disgust that would very swiftly lapse back into complete and total uncaring.

“I’m OBSESSED with us being, like, LITERAL twins right now” Kim again offered. She could see Kylie backsliding into the strange gravity-free blackness within, and she desperately wanted to throw her a lifeline and pull her back up to the surface of herself. But you can’t save a drowning man who doesn’t want to be saved, much less one who has discreetly lashed herself to a cinderblock and silently slipped into the water while everyone else is distracted by her mother’s topless lip synch performance of ‘Purple Rain’ on the yacht’s principle helipad. The sheer amount of overlap between these illustrative mixed metaphors and her actual lived experiences never ceased to amaze Kim. 

“The only thing I’m obsessed with is this delicious sense of spiritual vertigo” Kylie noted, neutrally. But is it still vertigo if you’ve already hurled yourself off the ledge and you’re in free-fall, almost delirious in anticipation of that final impact that will hopefully be powerful enough to instantly annihilate whatever faint spark still stubbornly animates you?

“I like, HONESTLY CAN’T EVEN HANDLE how HARD we’re twinning right now” Kim again gushed as she smoothed her perfectly smooth hair, and licked her naturally plump lips, and exhaled in such a way that her big, beautiful, pert breasts heaved and ever-so-subtly thrust forward, lending her an even-more-appealing-than-usual aspect.

“I honestly can’t even handle anything” Kylie observed - and it was true. Everything somehow managed to tumble from her clumsy grasp: glassware; perfectly ripe stone fruit; love. Soon enough, not matter what it was, in Kylie’s hands, it would slip away and be shattered. 

Kylie thought about trying to explain to Kim how she was feeling: 

She thought about telling Kim that she found it embarrassing, and unseemly, and even a bit cruel to insist upon some manifestly non-existent likeness between them, which only ever highlighted the vastness of the gulf between them;

She thought about telling Kim that nothing would ever change the irreducible truth of who they both were, what they were both capable of, and what they were both entitled to, which, in Kylie’s case, was nothing, nothing, and nothing, respectively;

She thought about telling Kim that her greatest wish was not to be like her, but, indeed, to be like no one at all - 

But instead she just said “Omigawd yah. SUCH twinsies” then turned her gaze back to the bright lights ahead. And there, in the blinding, obliterative, white expanse where form and color and time and self and everything else seemed simply to no longer exist, Kylie found something of the casual oblivion that she had so desperately been seeking. But it wouldn’t last for long - good things never did. ⧫

They say “Paris is an explanation” but they failed to account for the possibility of someone whose life was so lacking in meaning, and so resistant to basic causality that the very notion of an ‘explanation’ would be absurd and impossible. For how could a life that is nothing more than an agglomeration of happenstance, assembled in no particular order, and for no particular reason - unless discrete instances of cruelty and pain can be taken to be a reason unto themselves - ever pose a coherent question or warrant a satisfying response?

They say “Paris is a moveable feast” but they didn’t imagine someone whose life was so thoroughly and so completely marked by hunger: a hunger that was so acute, so chronic, and so permanently unalleviated, that even the concept of subsistence, or indeed, anything other than the existential famine that they knew as normal seemed to them unimaginable. Which is to say nothing of the idea that one could carry with them for a lifetime the memories, and inspiration, and solace found in one place, and that these small but meaningful comforts wouldn’t be violently wrested from them the moment they deigned to claim them as their own. For a person like this, it would all seem quite absurd.

They say “Paris is always a good idea” but they couldn’t have anticipated the kind of person who had never had, or even been party to a single good idea - the kind of person who had the uncanny ability to cast a pall of regret and shame and tedium over everything they ever did or even considered doing. It was almost impossible to imagine just how bad of an idea a person like this could make Paris: almost impossible to imagine just how thoroughly they would ruin it; almost impossible to imagine how the mere fact of their presence would set into motion a series of events so abject that Paris would seem naturally and singularly like the worst idea one could ever have had; almost impossible to imagine just how bitterly one could regret ever going there, and just how enduring that regret would be - never tempered by time, or made cathartic, or in any way given some greater purpose - just enduring, undiluted regret that would stain a lifetime.

Suffice it to say, Paris had proved to be something of a letdown for Kylie. 

She had heard so many wonderful things about this place: the life-changing effects that it had had on so many people, and she imagined that things might truly be different there; that she might truly be different there. And in these moments of hope, or at least the closest thing to hope that she could hope to experience, she foolishly allowed herself to believe that she might come to count herself among those fortunates who had found themselves transformed by the magic of Paris.

She wanted to experience everything the city had to offer: the art, the culture, the cuisine, the men --- 

Kylie’s mother Kris quickly interjected with ample advice on the latter -

“Now the thing you need to remember about French men, Kylie, is that they’ve all got a certain je ne sais quoi - that’s a French euphemism for medium-sized uncut cocks. You need to go into this with eyes wide open: they’re just not going to be packing in the way that you’re used to. Maybe some of the Algerians, but honestly, I wouldn’t count on it, and in my experience, that’s just a whole can of worms that isn’t even worth opening, unless you want to wake up in a field outside Lyon with a woman named Bianca who’s using your blouse as a tourniquet for a self-inflicted flesh wound. Now, don’t get me wrong, for the most part they’re still ample, but ‘just right’ is never going to be quite enough for girls like us: amiright? And while they’ve got the stamina, honestly, you’re going to have take a bit of a firm hand to keep them focused. Otherwise it’s just going to be an hour of well-intentioned fumbling around, followed by an entire evening of them curled up like a cat, chain smoking cigarettes, telling you that it’s ’68 all over again - like that’s going to get you off. Now the one exception of course is the young ones: if you can nab ‘em while they’re still figuring some things out…well, let’s just say, they’ll have energy to burn. Of course, the age difference can pose some logistical issues, but once you find yourself cruising the Lycée at 4:45 every weekday afternoon, you pretty much know what you’re after, and at that point, it’s between you and God. And you know, the great thing about these young guys is that they always have a friend, or a cousin, or a kid brother, and at that age, they’re not constrained by that awful performative masculinity that prevents so many American men from trying new things together. I mean, I guess what it really comes down to is just a cultural difference: you know, the whole joie de vivre mentality - that’s a French euphemism for leaving the semiotics of ‘this or that hole’ to the cultural theorists.” 

Kylie appreciated her mother’s candor, and she was sure that many of her insights would prove useful in time, but she was determined to chart her own course and discover Paris for herself, on her own terms. She was particularly eager to solidify her command of the language, which she felt was the key to unlocking a whole new world of potential in her adopted city. She remembered some of her high school French, which would provide a solid foundation, but she had never quite reached the point where it had become comfortable and natural to speak in casual conversation. She had always heard that the inflection point between a basic command of a language and functional fluency was when you began to dream in it. Which made sense she supposed, but was also difficult for her to imagine, having never dreamed in English, only ever in formless color fields of blood red, and a strange guttural pidgin speak that lacked the internal logic necessary to class it as language, and in physical sensations: most often that of a woman’s hands tightening gradually around her throat, after which she would always bolt awake choking and gasping for air as - she could swear - a shadowy figure that shared her mother’s distinctive gait slipped out through her bedroom door. As though it was real; as though it had actually just happened. 

She had also heard from so many people that different facets of their personality tended to be accentuated or brought forth by different languages:

“I’m ironical in Japanese, but fair-minded in German” Kylie’s acquaintance Aiko informed her one day. 

“I’m emotionally withholding in Dutch, but superstitious in Portuguese” her acquaintance’s acquaintance Pieter mentioned in passing. 

“I’m a slut in Arabic and a bigger slut in Farsi!” Kris cackled. “God, I wonder if Ahmed ever got that Green Card…shame about the drug trafficking charges, but those Honduran barbiturates weren’t going to walk themselves across the border to that rental house in San Diego!”

Kylie wondered if it might be the same for her in French. Perhaps not only would certain existing qualities come forth and others recede…perhaps an entirely new and better set of characteristics would reveal themselves? Perhaps in French she would be, or could be an entirely different person. Perhaps?

Or perhaps not. As it turned out, the French language only amplified all the things about her that Kylie hated most, which is to say, all of the things about her that others hated even more. And she internalized and nurtured all of this hatred until it had choked the last vestiges of what had once been her sense of self, and all that was left was a great obliterative absence that at once emanated and invited only ever, always ever more hatred.

Indeed, there were so many more ways to be negative in French; so many more ways to contemplate and conjecture and elaborate upon the stunning futility of life in general and yours in particular; so many more ways to formulate a disparaging assessment of yourself, and of course, so many more ways for everyone around you to affirm and elaborate and finesse all your great many shortcomings in the fleeting few minutes before they forsake you forever. 

So as she wandered through the streets of Paris, feeling, in a sense, so much more like herself than she ever had - which is to say alone, and like nothing at all - it occurred to Kylie that perhaps her greatest folly lay not in striving to be a different person, or a better person, but in striving to be a person at all.

After all, how could someone who was so constitutionally bereft and emotionally cordoned off and spiritually barren be considered a person? How could someone who had never shared a feeling, or a memory, or any sort of positively defined experience with any other living being know anything of what it is to be human? Who could even imagine someone like that, much less feel sympathy for them, much less reach out to them to try and show some modicum of kindness, or venture to establish a casual affinity, or make some perfunctory acknowledgement that they do, indeed, exist at all? 

They say “We’ll always have Paris” - 

But Kylie wouldn’t. She’d never have Paris; she’d never have anything at all. ⧫

“So Kylie, if it’s alright with you, I’d love to hear you to describe a typical day at work; I want to really get a sense of everything that goes into the running of a $900 million makeup empire” Michael, the Forbes writer prompted Kylie.

“Wellllll…umm…I guess like, I’d probably just be like, I dunno, hanging out doing like, social media stuff or like, a photoshoot or whatever…” Kylie demurred.

“I’m so glad you brought that up Kylie…” Michael gushed, though in truth he wasn’t glad of this, or much of anything else at the moment. A series of misfortunes had stricken in his personal life in recent months, which had the effect of making this assignment, along with most everything else feel empty, tedious, and even a little tormented. 

“…because you personally manage the social media accounts for Kylie Cosmetics? he both asked and answered.

“Yah” Kylie replied, in a tone that almost sounded smug, though to have been truly smug, she would have had to feel pride in her accomplishments, and to feel that, she would have had to have some abiding belief in her own essential worth as a person, and to believe in that, she would have had to conceive of herself as something other than an agglomeration of sensory faculties that only very infrequently worked in tandem to create an approximation of consciousness. So she wasn’t so much smug as she was terse, and maladjusted, and comprehensively uncomfortable. 

“And tell me a little more about your process…” Michael pressed on “What exactly goes into the planning of these posts?”

After a silence prevailed for too long to be intentional, Michael eventually interjected, adding:

“…because you’re really quite prolific…oftentimes two, three, four - or more! - posts a day, across so many different platforms! How do you do it? Is it planned out weeks in advance, or do you just take more of a spur of the moment approach?”

“I mean, like, sometimes the team will just be like “we should do this” and I’ll be like “yah”, but then a lot of the time I’m just like “this is cute” and then they’ll be like “yah” and then we just like do it, you know? So like, it’s definitely kinda both, but also like, just whatever feels right, you know? So like…yah…” Kylie clarified. 

“Brilliant!” Michael gushed, which was something he had never said before in this or any other context, but he had a British acquaintance who said it quite frequently, and now seemed as good a time as any to adopt a subtle but cloying affectation that no one would ever call him out on but would speak about at length behind his back. 

“So let’s talk about what else you oversee at the company - ” Michael prompted. 

“Umm, well, I guess like, colors? Kylie ventured.

“Colors?” Michael questioned.

“Yah. Like, colors, for like, everything?” Kylie replied. She had learned over time that in most cases, conversation was as simple as repeating back what someone had just said with a positive-sounding word or phrase attached to the end of the statement like “everything” or “totalllllly” or “and then I woke up behind the same gas station in Santa Barbara!” 

“Right. Because Kylie Cosmetics does offer a huge array of colors…” Michael clarified. “So tell me about your process for selecting them? Do you look at current beauty trends? Or do you solicit customer feedback? Or both?”

“Yah, like, I dunno. I’ll kinda just be like “I’m obsessed with black. Let’s do black?” and then we do it and then, like, yah?” Kylie explained. 

“Fascinating!” Michael exclaimed, and he was legitimately fascinated by what Kylie was saying, but more in the sense of being agog or aghast, less in the sense of having a genuine interest in or a desire to continue addressing the matter at hand. 

He continued: “So the black lipstick is obviously a personal favorite of yours, and has been such a hot seller…but tell me a little more about the creative process behind some of your other favorite shades???” Michael could hear that very particular note of gay obsequiousness sounding in his voice, and he wondered if he was becoming someone he hated, or if he had always hated himself but was only now noticing it for the first time? He supposed both could be true.

“Oh. Yah. I like, didn’t really do any of those?” Kylie clarified, in the unmistakable cadence of an inquiry. 

“And what was it about the black lipstick that resonated with you?” Michael asked. “It’s such an unusual shade for lips; it’s almost…antithetical to a lot of predominant beauty standards?” 

As soon as he said it, a strange look passed across Kylie’s face, and he immediately thought to himself “Shit! She doesn’t know what ‘antithetical’ or ‘predominant’ mean…” And even though the embarrassment in this instance should have belonged with Kylie, Michael instinctively began heaping blame and scorn upon himself - a curious by-product both of the ways in which spectacular wealth inoculates against shame and of Michael’s especially low self-esteem. 

But neither ‘antithetical’ or ‘predominant’ were the source of Kylie’s perplexed expression: it was the suggestion that something could have resonated with her in the first; that something could have impacted her profoundly enough to arouse in her something halfway resembling conviction; that anything at all could mean anything at all - to her, or to anyone. 

“I guess it was just that it was black, and like, I’m super into black?” Kylie replied. Her self-answering logic was almost more convincing than whatever banality she might have summoned in response to a question so staggeringly inconsequential that everyone’s energy would have been better spent trying to account for the conditions that made it possible for such a question to be posed in the first, rather than actually answering it. 

“Interesting” Michael fibbed, desperately trying to tease out something - anything - of value from this exchange. Maybe if he started indiscriminately singling things out as being of interest, they would suddenly become so? Maybe if he kept saying “brilliant” and “fascinating” and “interesting” some grand narrative would emerge as he listened back to the recordings of their conversations some days later back in New York? Maybe by some unknown and unknowable machinations, an exquisite through-line would emerge that united these stilted, prosaic ramblings into a coherent, revelatory whole?

But even then, he knew that would never be the case. He’d press ‘play’ and all he’d find was exactly what he had always known to be there, which is to say, a great deal of nothing. And there he’d sit, in his empty apartment - physically, but more so emotionally - wondering how it had all come to this? And he’d try to summon the necessary lies that had sustained and propelled him for so many years, but for the first time, there’d truly be nothing there. So instead of turning to these fragile, futile excuses, he would instead just neutrally note the sadness protruding into his existence from so many fronts and carry on doing the bare minimum required to sustain his current state - not because he cared, but because, at this point, doing the same thing required less effort than doing nothing at all. 

Which is not to say that he was doing poorly in life, at least not outwardly. Being a staff writer at Forbes was a good life: respectable, superficially stimulating, granting access to things beyond his nominal means. The current path that he found himself on was more than enough to secure a reasonable level of superficial success, and to essentially guarantee his comfort in perpetuity - if that had been what he wanted. But Michael wanted something more. And more to the point, he felt entitled to something more. For even now, at an age where he should have long ago been disabused of such notions, he was utterly convinced that the persistent stirrings within him of something uncommon - what he had come to understand as his own natural brilliance - was a promissory note that entitled him to precisely everything he wanted in life. 

Though the absurdity and vanity and immaturity of this sentiment had long been evident to Michael, and though he had recently made a great show of disavowing it to those who had known him best and longest, he could never quite stop believing in it, and never quite stop conceiving of his ultimate success, simply, as a matter of course. 

He had always known that he couldn’t sustain this type of work for long, and that it didn’t fulfill him in any real sort of way, and that he was precisely the type of man who, in the absence of a very certain kind of fulfillment would wither and retreat and become quietly petulant. But he was also the kind of man who had never quite been able to commit to doing the hard work to find that very certain kind of fulfillment. He felt entitled to so much, but had done so little to earn it, and when good fortune was undeservedly heaped upon him, as it so often had been, he scarcely paused for a moment to recognize it as such before returning to his low-level but persistent anxiety-tinged dissatisfaction.

“I can do so much more than this…” Michael would moan to his then-boyfriend, also named Michael, but who had started going by “Mike” once things had started getting more serious between them - both as a matter of expediency and because the more brusque, jocular quality of the shortened version did, in fact, suit him quite well. “I know babe…” Mike would sigh “…and I think you just need to do it!”

“You’re right! You’re right! I know you’re right” Michael would reply in the exact tone and cadence of Carrie Fisher’s character from ‘When Harry Met Sally’. They would both always laugh at this: it had been genuinely funny at first, but at this point, they only laughed to keep themselves from saying so many other things that could never be unsaid. There had been so many hours spent manufacturing identical crises, so many hours spent poring over identical sentiments, so many hours spent settling on identical resolutions with a pantomime of fresh resolve - that all Mike craved was a cessation to it all: the talking, the striving, the excuses, and most of all, the need for absolution. It seemed to him that surest path to contentment lay in the acceptance of this inherent limitations of life, and the studious nurturing of purpose, and values and love within those constraints. But every time he would try and raise this point, his words would somehow fall short of the sentiment, and he would feel somehow chastened, and Michael would feel somehow superior, and nothing would change at all. 

It was all so frustrating and so intractable: Michael’s preening and vanity cloaked as a noble pursuit for self actualization - and Mike’s endless indulgence of it. But for both of them, perpetuating the lie was so much easier than confronting, much less articulating the awful truth that perhaps Michael wasn’t nearly as good as he privately believed himself to be; perhaps he wasn’t half as good; perhaps he wasn’t even good at all. And even if he had been good enough - exceptional even - was that any guarantee of anything in life? Was the presence of brightness or even brilliance as singular as it seemed to be? Or was it entirely abundant: prized, but not at all rare, and only very frequently rewarded?

Sometimes both Michaels wondered whether they weren’t, in a sense, the worst of all possible mates for one another? So alike in temperament as to be able to mistake their own intractable dysfunction reflected back to them for intimacy, yet so fundamentally misaligned in their worldview as to make even the most fleeting accord on any practical matter utterly impossible.

But it wasn’t for any of these reasons that Mike had left the month before. He had been unfaithful - flagrantly so - and when he was inevitably caught out, just as he had known he would be, he had pretended to be in love with this silly little boy who could have been anyone, pretended to be be sorry, and pretended that for both of them, there was no longer any other choice. It was all over so much more swiftly and painlessly than it would have been if they had actually confronted the issues facing them with any degree of honesty. And even though Michael was the jilted one, he felt a sort of gratitude towards Mike for allowing him this easy out: the false rage that he would summon entirely for the benefit of his concerned and enraged friends was so much easier to perform than the caring or the hurt that he didn’t feel, but under any other circumstances, he would have been expected to demonstrate. 

As Michael contemplated all of this, and the silence between him and Kylie grew long, and dense, and permanent-seeming, eventually Kylie looked up and she noticed some strange quality in Michael’s countenance that she couldn’t quite name, but that she knew well: somewhere so far beyond despair that everyone except for the afflicted would have mistaken it for calm and reserve. As she studied his face, she felt a sudden urge to try and reach out to him; to try and break out of herself and break through to him; to try, for the first time in her life, to simply connect with another person, honestly and completely. 

She wanted to tell him everything -

She wanted to tell him that her entire business model, as such, was merely an aberration within a broader economic order that had itself, become an aberration;

She wanted to tell him that her so-called business acumen was just a strange confluence of forces beyond her comprehension or control, and very likely beyond anyone’s comprehension or control;

She wanted to tell him that the enterprise bearing her name wasn’t an enterprise in any normal sense of the term, unless a small cabal of grifters and opportunists temporarily aligning their efforts to extract the maximum profit from a necessarily short-lived gold rush was an enterprise, which she was beginning to suspect it was; 

She wanted to tell him just how much she wanted to tell him all of these things, just how much she wanted to confide in him, just how much she wanted to cry out to him “THIS IS FUCKING INSANE!!!”, and just how much she wanted for them to cry out in unison against the whole cruel, unreasoned, chaotic, pointless system. Because together, perhaps, they could begin to dismantle the lie that anything at all about the world as currently constituted was rooted in justice, or decency, or even sense; together perhaps, their existential thrashing might somehow be the thing to finally break through all of the un-sense and disorder that surrounded them, finally and completely laying waste to the lie of a rational, intelligible, predictable world; together, perhaps, they might be able to take the first step towards - if not a better world - then at least a more honest one. 

She wanted to tell him all of that; more desperately than she had ever wanted anything in her life. But when she opened her mouth to speak, she found that there were no words there to be uttered, and no vital energy within her to animate them. Everything was as it always had been, within and without, and in that moment she understood that no union or communion would ever be possible - with Michael, or with anyone else

Michael, sensing all of this in Kylie, and wordlessly sharing in it, wanted so much to bring her back from the brink of the abyss that he knew if she entered, she would never again escape. But he too was stymied by something - or more aptly, by the immensity of the nothingness between and around them. And when he tried to speak, nothing, thusly, came forward. 

So they just stood there, staring at one another, both rendered mute and dumb. And little by little, they retreated away from this tender threshold, back into their respective realms: so close, so similar, and yet, so necessarily apart. 

Just then, Kylie’s mother Kris breezed through the door - 

“Michaellllllll!!!” she cooed in a tone that presupposed familiarity where there was none, very transparently underscoring Michael’s temporary utility to her. It was intoxicating. “How ARE you babe??? You. Look. FABULOUS.” 

Michael knew that to go any further now would be to permanently erase whatever faint and fading sketches of integrity he still had; he knew that in this instance, even a fleeting acquiescence to his baser impulses would consign him to a terrible life made all the more terrible by its superficial luster; he knew that he should run: from Kris, from Kylie, from this assignment, from himself, from the entire, awful scrum of striving, lovelessness, and bankruptcy in every sense other than monetary. But instead, he just leaned into Kris, kissed the air around her supple, glowing, unlined cheeks, grabbed her forearm and exclaimed “No, YOU LOOK FABULOUS!!!”

And just like that, everything changed for Michael. It wouldn’t necessarily be for the better, but then again, change so seldom is. ⧫

Kris had pitched “Kim & Kourtney & Khloe & Kendall & Kylie & Kris Take Kenya” (Working Title) to the executives at Hulu as a limited-run docu-series that was to be a mixture of “Planet Earth”, “Heart of Darkness” and that Jay-Z interview from 1996 where two strippers orally pleasure each other next to him and the entirely nonplussed journalist in the back of an SUV stretch limousine. The project had been immediately green-lighted, but on the condition that the entire family would take part in a Safari-themed capsule episode. It had taken weeks to coordinate everyone’s schedules, but finally they were all here at the spectacular Masai Mara National Reserve. 

Out on the savannah, everything seemed different: balanced, elemental, free. All of them felt it, the difference, deeply and profoundly. It was truly as though they were different people: but the difference was not one borne of alienation from oneself; rather, it was a difference borne of drawing nearer to the essential truth of who you actually are. 

They all felt so vital, so alive, so present - not only within themselves, but in relation to each other. For the first time in years, they had the time to really just be - to talk, and share, and laugh, and cry, and play silly little games that whittled away the hours more satisfyingly than any of the lavish and convoluted diversions that they might have resorted to back home.

“Okay girls: if you could be any animal we’ve seen so far, which would you be?” Kris inquired one afternoon while they were out on the plains, waiting to spot a migrating herd of impalas. 

Kim went first: “Wellll…I think I’d have to be…a lioness.”

“Omigawd totally…”

“Yessssss…”

“Yassssss…”

“For surrrrrre…”

“A hairy pussy…that’d be a first for you!”

Kendall, Kylie, Kourtney, Khloé, and Kris all chimed in, respectively.

“Like, she’s obviously a super protective mom, but also like, totally independent, you know? Like, honestly, she doesn’t need her lion, but she just like, likes him being around sometimes, you know? And like, she tells him when to come by, and like, when he’s being a total jackass she’s just like “okay, check yourself?” Like, it’s totally on her terms, you know???” Kim elaborated.

“SO true, sweetie” Kris affirmed.

Kendall was next: “GOD! I can’t decide…whether I’d be an ostrich…or a giraffe???” she mused.

“Ooh, that’s a tough one!”

“I LITERALLY don’t know!”

“Like, HONESTLY, impossible!”

“Omigaaaaaawd!!!”

“A giraffe: your neck’s quite thick relative to your body, actually.”

Kim, Kylie, Kourtney, Khloé, and Kris all opined, respectively.

“Yeah, you know what? I think I would be a giraffe” Kendall concurred. “I feel like I have more of an aloof, languorous quality, and I tend to try and keep above the fray, you know? Like everyone else is down here on the ground battling to the death for moldering scraps of shit, and I’m just chilling up in the treetops nibbling on all those tender shoots that no one else can even reach?” And it was true. But luckily, the rest of the family were far too literal-minded, and their opinions of themselves far too high to pick up on her canny metaphor.

“And I think I’d be a zebra…” Kourtney chimed in. She paused to allow for the chorus of affirmation that had greeted Kim and Kendall, but after several very long minutes, when it became abundantly clear that none was forthcoming, she simply carried on, offering her own explanation:

“…because they’re kind of chill and elegant, and they’re like, OBSESSED with leafy greens, but there’s also something about them that’s somehow like, oddly rigid and ill-at-ease?”

“Oh”

“Um”

“Yah”

“Sure”

Kim, Kylie, Kendall, and Khloé eventually responded. 

“OMIGAWD! LOOK at this HILARIOUS text Scott just sent me!” Kris called out, holding up her phone to display a video of Kourtney’s absentee, addiction-addled, serially unfaithful ex-husband sandwiched between two completely naked 18 year-old models who were holding a single spaghetti noodle between their two gaping maws in the manner of ‘Lady and the Tramp’ while he smeared marinara sauce up from their bellybuttons and around both breasts in the rough approximation of a heart.

“LOVE that guy!” Kris gushed. “GOD! You really fucked that one up, Kourt.”

A chorus of hearty affirmation rang out. After the din of commentary around Scott’s many redeeming qualities and Kourtney’s shameful dereliction of wifely duties had subsided, Khloé offered up her suggestion:

“Soooo…I think I’d be like, maybe…a gazelle?”

A very telling silence prevailed. 

“…because, like, they’re just fast, and streamlined, and just like, don’t take anybody’s bullshit, you know???” Khloé clarified.

“Umm Khlo’, no offense or anything, but like, don’t you think something a little…umm, larger might be more appropriate?” Kim inquired passive aggressively, if passive aggression were also naked condescension and contempt.

“Oh what Kimberly? Like a FUCKING GORILLA? OR A FUCKING FAT DROOLING WARTHOG?? OR A GODDAMN OBESE WATER BUFFALO WHO NEVER STOPS EATING, EVEN WHEN IT’S TAKING A MOTHERFUCKING SHIT DOWN ITS LEG??? OR A FUCKING DISGUSTING, FILTHY HIPPO THAT’S GOTTEN SO FUCKING FAT IT’S NOT EVEN FUCKING BUOYANT ANYMORE???? OR A MOTHERFUCKING ENORMOUS-ASS ELEPHANT WHOSE FAT FUCKING GUT IS DRAGGING ALONG THE GODDAMN GROUND, RUBBING ALL OF ITS ENGORGED, DISCOLORED TEETS UNTIL THEY’RE BLOODY AND RAW?????” Khloé raged.

“Yah. Exactly. Really any of those seems about right.” Kim replied

“But especially the elephant” Kris chimed in. “I’m just speaking for myself, but I know that there’s been more than one occasion where I lived in fear of being buried alive under a few hundred pounds of your shit…and I’m not speaking metaphorically!” she clarified, quite unnecessarily. 

Conspicuously silent in all of this was Kylie. Truth be told, she didn’t know what kind of animal she’d be. And it seemed to her that in order to single out some identifying characteristics in another creature, you’d first have to be able to single out some identifying characteristics in yourself: what animated you; what motivated you; how others perceived you. In short, you’d have to have some loose grasp of who - and what - you were. But for Kylie, whose experience of life and self was wholly dissociative, dissembling, and violently incoherent, such abstractions were not only impossible, but senseless. She saw how easy it was for her sisters to latch onto some abiding trait - true or not - but try as she might, she could locate no distinctive quality, no identifying feature, no distinguishing pattern of behavior or comportment in herself. 

The closest thing to affinity, kinship, or camaraderie with another living thing that Kylie had experienced on this trip was the sensation she felt upon coming across a desiccated, sun-bleached carcass that had been picked clean by an orgy of ravenous predators some indeterminate time ago. She couldn’t account for it on any rational or intellectual level, but as she looked at the exquisite banquet of shattered bones, flung out for many meters in all directions, a small voice - quite benign in comparison the other malevolent voices that populated her head - whispered gently “Like me. Like me. Like me.”

She didn’t know what that could possibly mean, so instead she finally just offered up the best alternative that she could muster: “Well, I guess maybe a woodland dormouse? Because they’re like, small, and easily frightened, and have a very short life expectancy - both because of their constitutional frailty and their perfect susceptibility to every kind of predator on the savannah?” Kylie clarified. 

But everyone else had stopped paying attention to Kylie, much less listening to her, and were now several yards away conducting an impromptu photoshoot to take advantage of the hazy, golden, late-afternoon light. 

“Kendall, take your top off, then kind of lean into Kim and cover her right tit with your left hand. PERFECT. And Khloé, you get down on all fours and just kind of press your face down into the dirt…like you’re being plowed by some guy whose buzz is wearing off and his mounting disgust is causing him to ram you even more hatefully than usual…GORGEOUS. And Kourtney, you can just sit down there right beside Khloé and kind of lean on her ass…but turn three quarters so we don’t get all of your puss’…actually, no, on second thought, stay like that: we can always crop it out later, but better to have the option.” Kris enthusiastically art directed.

Kylie wandered over to join her family. “Hey guys? Can I get in the shot?” she inquired.

“Oh sweetie! You know, I think that would throw off the composition, but I tell ya’ what: you stay right here, and we’re all just going to run back to the Land Rover for a minute to get out of the sun and grab some water, then we’ll do an epic photoshoot, just you and me. How’s that sound?” Kris offered.

“Amazing!” Kylie replied, feeling, in truth, anything but. 

---

“Mommmmm…I’m like, HOT…and BORED…” Kim moaned, moments later, from inside the idling Land Rover. 

“Fuck it. Me too. Let’s just go back to the hotel.” Kris responded

“Kayyyy…” Kim replied, looking up from the fetal position into which she had contorted herself. Even in the position, there was something especially lovely, and by extension, loveable about her. 

“Sweetie, you don’t look so good…why don’t you lie down on the back seat there” Kris advised. ‘Oh, but shit…now we don’t have room for all of us…” Kris trailed off. A moment later she called out the window to Kylie who was still traipsing about expectantly in the honey-colored twilight:

“Kylie we’re going to head back now…but you stay and enjoy…and you can just make your own way back to the hotel, okay?”

“Umm, okay…but which way is it?” Kylie asked, looking around at the essentially featureless expanse of arid grassland. 

“That way!” Kris called out, not gesturing or even so much as looking in any particular direction. “Just follow the tire tracks or something…you’ll be fine!” she shouted unintelligibly as the car began to roll away.

“BANG BANG!!!” Khloé called out as she pantomimed shooting at Kylie repeatedly with an assault rifle. “I bagged a leopard!!!” she announced, having learned long ago that the surest, and perhaps the only route to mitigating her family’s cruelty was to guide their ire to an even weaker and more vulnerable target; someone with far less self worth; someone constitutionally given to heaping blame upon themselves; someone who would tolerate endless abuse, and whose amenability to being mistreated only ever made them all the more contemptible, inviting yet more lavish types of abuse. Someone like that.

“A fat one too!” Kim added, and the whole car erupted into raucous laughter, not because it was especially funny, but because it just felt good to laugh, and better yet to laugh at someone so thoroughly deserving of scorn.

“Bye WHORE” Kourtney called out, though somehow, this one fell a little flat. Not that it was unfunny exactly, it just wasn’t…right. A little uninspired; a little rote; the delivery somehow wooden and listless - all of which undercut the power of the sentiment. In fact, it was very much like Kourtney herself: certainly not wrong in the totalizing sense of someone like Kylie, but chafing, stilted, and always ever slightly out of step.

Kendall meanwhile continued her well-established practice of ignoring everyone and everything around her. At this point, her continued association with her family was strictly for professional gain, though she was beginning to wonder whether they were beginning to become a hindrance, rather than a help in achieving her decidedly more discreet and hopefully durable ambitions. Her management kept trying to push her into the gold rush of slickly branded generic cosmetics, but she had held firm: her integrity had no price tag. Though if it did, it would have been in the low-to-mid-nine-figure range, and it would be called ‘Kenny’, and the packaging would be an elegant matte white with unobtrusive serif type that lent the impression of trustworthy clinical rigor. 

“Miss Kris…shall I take you back now?” their driver Chitundu asked - though he said it with the surety of a declarative statement. He was assertive, confidant, and strong. At only 18 - or perhaps even younger - there was a stolidity about him that lent absolute confidence to everyone who encountered him. He had a sweet, boyish aspect about his face, but his body: his body was assuredly that of a man. Kris placed her hand on his inner thigh and let it linger there, then she looked directly into his eyes with a look that was at once wildly consumptive and perfectly yielding. “Yes, Chitty” - her pet name for him which had just occurred to her in that moment - “take me…back.”

---

Hours later, as Kylie wandered around the savannah in perfect darkness, she began to feel something that was, if not contentment exactly, then at least a marked cessation of all the usual terrors that had hollowed her out to the frailest veneer of a person. There was something in this place; something about this place that made her feel, for the first time, grounded, connected, and whole. “Africa…” she sighed, breathing it out, then breathing it all back in. 

She came across a small thicket of soft grasses, and she lowered herself down into its fragrant midst. And as she pressed her face against the ground, she felt that the earth was still warm, and then, she felt something else; something inside of her: a vital energy that she had never known before. “Africa! Africa!! Africa!!!” she again called out into the lonely night, which to her, felt not lonely at all, but rather, like the homecoming she had never believed she would have.  

So lost was she in her reverie that she didn’t even notice the rustling in the brush just beyond; didn’t even notice the bright white glint of too many sets of eyes to count, all focused on her; didn’t even notice the rumbling, guttural, involuntary snarls that sounded out just before an almost impossible-seeming hunger was, at long last, about to be satiated. 

Some miles away, back at the villa, as Chitundu slumbered inside, depleted in the most totalizing sense of the term, Kris sat by the pool, making gentle kicking motions with her feet that every so often would cause a few cool drops to splash up onto her naked breasts, milky and glowing in the moonlight. Eventually, for no particular reason other than to manifest the joyful abandon that comes with getting - and keeping - everything you ever wanted, she stood up and began to twirl. Slowly at first, but then faster, and faster, and faster. And in time, this lack of control gave way to curious, self-regulating centripetal force, and suddenly everything was suspended, weightless, and free. She felt as though she could stay like this forever. 

Just then, the shrieks of a pack of hyenas rang out, piercing the perfect silence of the night. And their raving chorus, dissonant but markedly celebratory, jolted Kris, very nearly causing her to lose her balance and tumble headfirst onto the hard, stone pool deck underfoot. But like every other close call of her life, she caught herself in time, regained her footing, and carried on - the unfortunate interruption forgotten nearly as soon as it had happened. Indeed, it could be said that these brushes with destruction only ever made her stronger; more resolute; more like herself. ⧫

“Omigawd Kylie…isn’t life just GREAT???” Kendall asked in the form of an exclamation, not even for a moment pausing to consider that there might be any other way to answer that question apart from an emphatic, heaving, all-over “YES!!!!!!” - a “YES!!!!!!” that radiates out from your core so powerfully that it seems almost unnecessary to verbalize it, but you do anyways and then you toss your head back and lose yourself in a fit of laughter which, truly, is the only appropriate reaction to the sheer joy, overwhelming gratitude, and evergreen self-love that grows stronger within you with each passing day.

“Huh?” Kylie responded after an uncomfortably long silence in which successive waves of terror, mania, and spiritual nausea crashed over her, greying her countenance, and contorting her otherwise congenial features into a sort of rigid mask that defied description, except to say that it was displeasing in the extreme - all the more so because it stubbornly resisted characterization. If it could simply have been said  that “her eyes are too close together” or “her cheeks are too fat” or “her chin is too pronounced and her brow ridge too heavy and her hairline too low” it would have been possible to locate the precise source of the displeasure felt upon looking at Kylie, and then perhaps propose a solution. But with each successive surgical intervention, as Kylie’s features were broken and reconstituted, smoothed, plumped, buffed, and finally airbrushed into a tromp l’oeil approximation of some other person altogether, the displeasing aspect about her only seemed to grow more and more pronounced. “Shit! It must be her nose...” Kylie’s mother Kris finally concluded. And indeed, it may well have been.

“Isn’t life just SO GREAT!!!” Kendall reiterated, this time as a declarative statement, though one that absolutely demanded an answer in the affirmative.

Kylie had heard Kendall perfectly well the first time, but she needed a moment to parse the words for meaning, like a child sounding out a single-syllable word for the first time, some eight months after even the slowest of their peers had accomplished the same feat. “Isn’t…life…so…great?” she mused. “Life…” She knew that she was alive, biologically speaking, but wasn’t “life” - at least in the sense that her sister meant it - so much more than just scraping by at the lowest, darkest recesses of of sentience? So much more than a reactive body shuffling through space, deterministically reacting to environmental stimuli, absent any intention? Like a mouse, whose already limited cognitive functions have been suspended by chronic malnourishment…or like an insect, trapped between two panes of glass, hurtling itself with mounting mania at the impression of freedom so vividly rendered before them, but so necessarily out of reach…or like the little white ball dropped into a pinball machine, sent violently careening in every direction by levers and switches and spring-loaded mechanisms, where each erratic, senseless thrust spares it a moment more from the final oblivion at the bottom of the incline, and eventually that little white ball even begins to feel gratitude to be the interchangeable plaything in the unending nonsense game of some malevolent overlord.

“Omigawd yah: SO great.” Kylie finally responded. She had learned long ago that parroting back other’s words, but in a slightly different inflection was all that was required to sustain a conversation with those around her. It didn’t much matter how she said it, just that they felt themselves being reflected back at them, and that they didn’t feel - or didn’t feel much of - Kylie’s noxious presence. She had been deploying this tactic ever since middle school, when she had, for a few, fleeting months, felt somehow liberated to let her unvarnished, unfiltered self be known - only to suffer devastating wave after devastating wave of rejection, abandonment, and meticulous, workmanlike cruelty from everyone around her. “You’re like, SO weird” Kylie’s friend Kayla had chastened her, just before they never spoke again. “You’re like, SO annoying” Kylie’s friend Madison had assailed her, just before she forbid anyone else from ever associating with Kylie again. “You’re like, SUCH A DUMB TWAT” Kylie’s mother Kris had screamed from the driver’s seat of her BMW convertible, just before she swerved wildly into oncoming traffic for the express purpose of tearing through a puddle and kicking up a great wall of fetid brown water into Kylie’s face. “AND FUCKING FAT TOO!” she wailed as she sped off into the distance, already fifteen minute late for her standing weekly appointment at the facialist. After that, Kylie thought it best to let others do the talking. 

“Sooooo…like…if you were to pick ONE THING about life that was like, the GREATEST, what would it be?” Kendall inquired, but before Kylie had even had a chance to respond, Kendall burst into a fit of laughter that would have almost seemed manic were it not so manifestly and genuinely rooted in pure joy. “OMIGAWD like, OF COURSE you can’t pick JUST ONE THING!!! Like, what am I even DOING? Like, what am I even SAYING?? Like, who AM I??? Fuck!!! LIFE!!!!!”

Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the disorienting haze of Kendall’s mounting euphoria, Kylie cannily deflected:

“And what about you? What would you say are the greatest things about life?

“Omigawd; like, SO many! Like, where can I even start???” Kendall shrieked in delight.

Kylie wasn’t sure where she, or Kendall, or anyone else could start - with regards to this or any other undertaking. It seemed to her, that in order to “start” anything, one would first have to be someplace - anyplace at all where things out of sight could still be imagined and progressed towards, where time still existed and could, even in some imprecise way, be measured and meted out, where a tiny pinprick of light - as either a metaphor, or an actual thing - might be allowed to announce itself even for a moment in the midst of the dense, complete, infinite blackness that prevailed within and without. 

“I mean, obviously family…”

The greatest and most persistent cruelty Kylie had ever known had been at the hands of those to whom she was related, though with the question of her paternity being the wildly open question that it was, perhaps it was all just the rightful wrath of complete strangers forced into her company through cruel and convoluted circumstance.

“…and like, friends, of course…”

Kylie was aware of the concept of ‘friends’, of course; aware that some people chose freely to associate with one another and nurture a gentle, ongoing, mutually beneficial connection; aware that some people had other people on whom they could depend and in whom they could place their trust; aware that some people managed to live their lives intertwined harmoniously with the lives of others, away from the great orgy of self-interest, opportunism and extraction that she had always known as the natural state of things. 

“…and like, my health, for sure…”

Kylie had a complicated relationship with health and wellness: on the one hand, there was the persistent psychic terror that manifested itself as dense, gnawing, all-over pain that seemed to bear down upon every atom of her being, yet on the other hand, there was the sensation of being a hollow vessel: a transient wisp of something that threatens at every turn to dematerialize, leaving behind not enough to sustain even the faintest memory.

“…and, I mean, like, honestly, money…”

Money, one of the few identifiable achievements of Kylie’s life, had only ever been a burden to her. It had a strange, almost gravitational power that pulled more and more people into her orbit, yet the more bound she became to an almost unfathomably large number of people, the more impossible it seemed that she would ever enjoy a relationship that was anything other than a perfectly one-sided transaction, and she found herself wishing once more to be completely untethered from everyone and everything - a wish, that like every other wish she had ever made, would never be granted, and instead would be answered in inverse. 

“...ad then there’s just little things like this amazing weather…”

Kylie never did understand the fascination with weather and the endless commentary thereof. Whether good or bad, the conditions outdoors only ever had the effect of drawing her attention back to her own clumsy, useless body which stubbornly persisted in this physical realm: hot or cold, wet or dry, she would continue to be shuttled throughout space to no particular end, and for no particular reason. 

“…and the accessibility of air travel…”

Kylie hadn’t been on a commercial flight ever since that incident with the hot tea and suppositories had caused the plane to make an emergency landing in Honolulu…but upon reflection, she had to commend the professionalism, stolidity, and adherence to protocol that the JAL cabin crew had displayed in the face of an incident for which there assuredly was no precedent. 

“…and the democratizing power of the internet…”

Kylie wasn’t exactly sure what the particular power of the internet was, but it seemed to her that they way in which she and her family was wielding it was almost certainly not advancing the cause of personal liberation or bringing about the broadest possible enfranchisement. 

“…and just like, honestly…EVERYTHING!!!” Kendall finally concluded. “But seriously Kylie: WHAT. ABOUT. YOU???”

“Um, well, uh, I guess, I dunno, I guess like, maybe, the greatest thing about life issss…that it’s finite?” Kylie responded

“OMIGAWD you’re like a FUCKING ZEN GODDESS PHILOSOPHER RIGHT NOW and I’m like OBSESSED with it!!! Like, SO FUCKING DEEP. Like, LITERALLY can’t even handle” Kendall shrieked as she tossed her head back with such abrupt, jerking force that she almost could have pulled a muscle - but of course she didn’t, and the gesture just served to punctuate the severe, almost painful, abundance of joy that she felt, and to fill her lungs with the biggest, fullest, most invigorating breath of fresh air. 

“Oh. Yah. Thanks?” Kylie replied.

“OMIGAWD, like yah. Like, you need to make an app or something. Like I don’t even know. Like I just want to like, listen to you talk about LIFE, you know, and just like, BE, you know? Like, honestly, you could be like, a guru or whatever. Like, I’m not even joking.”

“Okay. Sure. Yah!” Kylie replied. And for the first time in a long time she felt a little burst of something deep within that was very much like hope. She began to see possibility unfolding before her, and in that instant, everything seemed perfect and pregnant and new. Maybe life wasn’t just bearable, or fine, or good…maybe life, as Kendall had said - as Kendall had known - was, in fact, completely and utterly GREAT?

She held this thought in her mind: trying to own it, trying to inhabit it, trying to adjust to it as her new reality. And for a moment, she very nearly did…but then it was gone. Like everything else she had ever deigned to call her own.

And she smiled a forced, false smile, and stared, with her dead, dulled gaze, off into a familiar nothing-in-particular. She didn’t know what might lie ahead, or what it would all amount to - though the likeliest answer to both was a resounding "nothing." All she knew for sure is that wherever it was, and whatever it might be, it definitely wasn’t life, and it definitely wouldn't be great. ⧫