Straight On Til' Mourning

XI.

Twenty-four months ago, she had realized who she was.

Not Kirsten, the daughter of two self-made millionaires. Not Kirsten the Triplet or Kirsten the Beautiful of even Kirsten the Fair of Heart.

She was Kirsten – just Kirsten – the sister who did nothing.

Knightley had her campaigns and her grand expectations. She had her movies – her pageants – and her bevy of starlet girlfriends who dressed and talked like her. In the ring of fame and social media, she wore a silver tiara, boosted a dirty mouth, and downplayed her association with the two girls that had pushed her to pursue her dreams.

Kolleen had her fears, her assumptions. She hoarded comics and gadgets, made costumes for Comic Con and spent hours a day gaming online in her room. While she played the part well enough – salon-styled hair, spindled arms and legs – she kept the things she loved close within reach. Cyberspace was her safe haven, and she exploited it to its fullest advantage: meeting people, creating vlogs, internet-dating boys that kept hordes of Lord of the Rings or Stars Wars memorabilia.

But Kirsten: she had dead flowers. She had the beach, which left her skin crisped red and riddled with tan lines. She had the heart of a tourist and the complete lack of ability to look beyond the present.

This was how she saw herself. It was not a flattering viewpoint but it suited her, and it excused laziness and procrastination because it was, if nothing else, believable.

Her life had been wasted. One strike to the temple with golf club, with fist. One less body that breathed clean air and took up otherwise unoccupied squares of space. Why had she wasted it? Why hadn't she been given more direction?

She remembered sitting, thinking this, quite often. But she never remembered how it ended: did she begin to cry, or did she fall back into dreamless sleep?