Can you imagine yourself falling from a great height? What might play through your mind in those moments before you hit the Earth's surface? Can you see yourself, face turned towards the sky, plummeting towards the ground? Arms outstretched like an angel. You might even hover a moment before you die. You might float before the impact destroys you. And what will you think then? Right before you meet the world?

The dulcet voice of Mikayla Nogueira rings through the speaker of my iPhone 15 Pro. "The pigment is unreaaaal you guys". I watch slender fingers dance across a Pat McGrath eye shadow palette. Manicured nails with silver stars press into iridescent powders, revealing their shimmer. My focus holds on her precise demonstration, each shimmer gliding across the surface of her poreless wrist. A Zara Larsson song beats through the speaker as I learn the name of each shade, dutifully committing them to memory.

I flick out of TikTok and into a search engine. I type "Pat McGrath" into the search bar. My thumbs are frantic with desire and, before I've even finished typing, "Pat McGrath Labs x moonlit seduction palette" autofills ahead of me. I am directed to LOOKFANTASTIC.com, where the eyeshadow palette appears before me in all its hard, shiny plastic glory.

It will arrive within 24 hours. I quickly close the Google app, ashamed of this senseless purchase.

I sit in my house with the blonde Chihuahua. We cuddle on the sofa, and I contemplate dying. Dying before the eye shadow palette arrives. Who will feed the chihuahua if I die?

That night, I go to sleep naked under the bed sheets. The quiet hum of my one-room box apartment has settled into itself. I hold the chihuahua close to my chest. Both of us blonde and in bed. I think of Marilyn Monroe and how she, too, would have slept naked. She said once in an interview that the only thing she wore to bed was Chanel No. 5. Of course, this is just advertising. Everything is advertising. I wonder what brand of eyeshadow Marilyn Monroe wore? Probably one of those old cosmetic brands like Rimmel or something. I'm sure I could look it up. I reach for my phone.

Elizabeth Arden. Makes sense.

As I fall asleep, I think about Mikaela and the superior sparkle of the Pat McGrath eyeshadow palette I will surely have by sunset tomorrow.

In the morning, I look at my phone and scroll six TikToks in quick succession. I receive a notification that my eyeshadow palette is on its way. Someone somewhere is thinking of me, packing my palette into a box and sending it out into the world. Acknowledging my desires and making my dreams come true. I can already picture myself swatching each shade on the back of my hand like Mikayla did. Showing my friends how intense the colours are. The superior pigmentation compared to your regular high-street brand. I smile to myself.

In the afternoon, I place a vase of tulips on the windowsill. I open the window wide and let the sunlight dance around the porcelain-white tulip heads. It is German glass, I was assured by the antiques dealer when I bought the vase at auction. It looks like any other glass, but it was in fact blown by hand in Germany sometime around 1960. A German vase with tulips grown in Holland and flown to London for me to buy. I furtively push the glass vase closer to the window ledge until it teeters on the edge, then watch it disappear out the window of my little box apartment. I hear the impact, distant and ordinary. When I look down from the window ledge, I can just make out the whites of the flower heads amongst the smashed glass. The concrete of the pavement below is stained dark by the water. The tulips are still recognisable, strangely intact. Maybe they are free now? The box apartment feels bigger somehow.

The vase was older than I am. It was in its late 60s, maybe 65? 66? The tulips were only a few weeks old. There's a strange imbalance in that thought. The vase that held the tulips was decades old, and the flowers, by comparison, very, very young. Bright and brief. I wonder how old my eye shadow palette is.

I hover my head out the window and stare for a while at the tulips and the broken glass. The tulips are splayed out, their stems crisscrossing like showgirls’ legs during a can-can, platinum heads like wilting updos. The shattered glass across their rubbery leaves sparkles like the beaded trim of a WCC leotard. I imagine them dancing, high kicks in the air. Everything is caught in a single choreographed moment of collapse and decoration.

From above, I see the bright red hat of a DPD driver. He carries a parcel shrouded in plastic, the words LOOKFANTASTIC.COM pressed across it. I watch as he steps over the tulips and presses my door code into the keypad.

It has arrived.

I remove the plastic packaging and gently slide the glossy black casket from its box. I think about how these powders will outlive me, how the tiny, shimmering microplastics in each pan will exist well beyond their application. How they’ll be suspended in oceans, trapped in soil, woven invisibly through rain and dust and blood. How they’ll spill out into the atmosphere and sparkle forever, shimmering longer than any star or sunbeam. The eyeshadow will never die, it will exist long after my body has rotted away. A makeup stain on the face of the Earth.