2021 | I Feel Myself Kylie H

I remembered the nights I’d spent cataloging my failures, the slow drip of small regrets that had become background noise. Kylie’s voice in my ear felt like a window being thrown open. “What changed?” I asked aloud, though no one was there to hear.

When I pressed play, her laugh arrived first: bright and raw, like sun cutting through the wet glass. Then she spoke, slow and emphatic. “I feel myself,” she said. “Do you ever get that? Like… I’m finally right here, and everything behind me is only practice.” i feel myself kylie h 2021

I thought of how she’d painted her wall and thought: maybe we all get to paint something ridiculous across the rooms of our lives. Maybe we can invent murals that loop the sky and the sea and call them home. I remembered the nights I’d spent cataloging my

Weeks later she came by, dripping paint on the floor, cheeks pink with something like triumph. She smelled like turpentine and citrus and possibility. Without ceremony she sat at my kitchen table and traced her finger across my list. “Keep this,” she said. “Add to it. Cross things out when they stop fitting. Don’t be afraid to change the rules.” When I pressed play, her laugh arrived first:

Rain blurred the city into watercolor streaks as I waited under the awning of the café. My phone buzzed with the same message I'd read a dozen times: a voice memo from Kylie. I hesitated, thumb hovering, because listening meant letting her world spill back into mine—messy, honest, and dangerously alive.

I walked to the river, partly because it felt right, partly because I wanted to be near the water she loved. A couple argued quietly on a bench; an old man fed pigeons with the slow concentration of someone performing an act of worship. I found a lantern’s reflection and watched it ripple.