I Like to Fork Myself

The last thing Daul Kim posted to her blog was a song. I Go Deep by Jim Rivers. And then she was gone—twenty years old, South Korean, one of the most striking faces in fashion, found dead in Paris.

She had been working at the highest level: i-D, Dazed & Confused, Vogue. The cover of Russh, photographed by Beau Grealy, shot just weeks before—her cool, direct gaze doing what it always did, making you feel like you were the one being examined. Her agency, Next Models, put out the kind of statement agencies put out: She was a top model and a great friend to all of us at Next. Please respect her family’s privacy at this time of sadness. We will all miss her very much. The language of institutions. The language of people who don’t know what else to say.

Her blog was called I Like to Fork Myself, and she’d been writing it for two years. For a while it seemed like there had been no signs. Then someone went back through the archives and found them everywhere. My life is so god damn predictable. It’s disgusting. And later: This endless loneliness, there must be something wrong from the core. I worry as I take the courage to sleep. The kind of sentences you read differently after the fact. The kind you probably scroll past before.

I keep thinking about the blog. About the fact that she kept writing it throughout all of it—the runway shows, the magazine covers, the traveling between cities that don’t belong to you—and that the last thing she chose to leave there was a piece of music. Not a word. Just a song she wanted someone to hear. That tells you something, though I’m not sure exactly what.