My filler is migrating. My face is getting wider, like a dinner plate. Like one of those frilled-neck lizards on Animal Planet who puff out their cheeks like parachutes when they're about to get eaten by a dingo.

That's me now.

That’s my whole face.

Whatever. My filler has no sense of boundaries or borders. In times like these, that's beautiful. No one's deporting my Juvederm to El Salvador simply because it decided to sail westward in search of the American Dream.

Go forth, my little Sculptra refugees. March. Colonize my armpits. Settle in my goddamn ear lobes. Turn my face into a human Frisbee. Who am I to stand in the way of your wanderlust?

Turn me into one of those shitty rooftop TV antennas from the seventies.

Fine by me.

I save money on pillows now. I just rest my head against itself.

They call it pillow face which is a polite way of saying you done fucked your face up. You pump that shit in like you're frosting a wedding cake, you think you’re smarter than gravity—and you end up looking like a party balloon three days after the party. The one stuck to the greasy ceiling.

Filler is a crafty little fucker. It drifts. It puffs up. It pools where it shouldn't. It doesn't care about your plans. Over time, the gel absorbs water, swells, and starts to migrate—following the path of least resistance through the soft tissue of the face. Gravity pulls it downward. 

Instead of sitting up high and pretty like it was supposed to, it puddles around your mouth, slumps along your jawline, bags up under your eyes—gives you that puffy, bloated look everybody pretends not to notice. Muscle movement pushes it sideways. It rides the soft, collapsing highways of your face, like a drunk on a Greyhound, until everything looks wrong.

Then one day you wake up and realize your face is a funhouse mirror.

Your Juvederm packed its bags and left for a better life.

Your Sculptra retired to Florida, bought a condo, never wrote back.

Good luck to them.

Good luck to the diaspora, drifting under my own skin.

A community of molecules dispersing from their homeland, settling wherever they please.

I understand migration patterns. I've been an immigrant many times—from one country to another, then from youth to somewhere unnamable and horrifying, a journey that is occurring happened without my consent.

Getting older in 2025 feels offensive, like an administrative error someone should have caught sooner. "There must be some mistake," the Internet seems to whisper. "Have you tried injectables?"

Yes, bitch. I’ve tried them all. It's called buying time. Duct-taping a corpse. Stapling dead leaves back onto a tree. Anything to keep from looking like a deflated mattress.

Naomi Watts is pushing lube for mature pussies on Instagram now.

Like Naomi’s cooch, my expanding face demands to be seen.

It spreads out.

It refuses containment.

It shows what I am, not what I wanted to be.

It is borderless. Blown out.

A crop circle. A giant lily pad. A ceremonial gong nobody asked to hear.

It is the Woman in the Moon serving Picasso realness.

Every three months, my face and I make the trip south to Mexico to get shot up. I drive from L.A. to San Diego, park at San Ysidro, walk across the border on foot. I find a driver on the other side who knows exactly where I'm going. Everyone in Tijuana knows the American beauty tourists.

The office is clean, modern, and charges one-third of what I'd pay at Alchemy 43. My dermatologist has the bedside manner of a barbed wire fence.

"COMMUNICATE YOUR FEELINGS," she says, jamming that harpoon into my supraorbital foramen.

I've had it all: the vampire facial where they suck your blood and spit it back into your skin. I’ve also had the threads jammed under my face like rigging on a sinking ship.

First round was okay. Second round, she had to break through scar tissue.

"Stay very, very still," she barked.

When the needle hit a nerve, I jumped.

"WHAT DO YOU FEEL?" she snapped.

What do I feel? I don’t fucking know, bitch. I’ve never known. That’s the problem. I’m a professional not-feeler. Now shut the fuck up and make me pretty.

Bruised, bloody, and puffy as a marshmallow, I leave the clinic and take another Uber to a special bus stop. The special bus helps you cross back faster—not everyone knows about it. But I’m a pro. Then I walk across again, face swollen like a basketball, and the American border patrol cunt looks at me suspiciously.

“What was the purpose of your journey?”

"Medical," I say, and usually they wave me through.

Other times they take me to secondary inspection, search my bags for Percocet and ask questions while I sit in a room with nervous-looking mules in ankle shackles. There we are—me, them, and my filler—all of us trying to migrate somewhere, all of us subject to the arbitrary mercy of borders. These days I'm scared they'll check my phone and see I liked a pro-Palestine post by Kneecap and decide to lock me up forever. “They were great at Coachella!” I’d say.

One time, my friend and I had just gotten our faces blasted, still bandaged up like crime victims, when we got lost trying to walk back to the U.S.

I walked up to a Federale with a gun to ask for directions.

"¿Dónde está Estados Unidos?" I asked, high on dental anesthesia.

He pointed behind us.

We’d been walking deeper into Mexico.

I laughed.

My feet keep pointing away from America, these days. I’ve built an entire life in a place that’s clearly toxic AF. Maybe that’s why I can’t sit still. I want to keep walking. Away from LA, the nonstop hustle to be fuckable in a world that's already fucked. Wanting to run away from your own face - fuck, from your own life - is that, like, a red flag? Inquiring minds want to know.

On the drive back up to Los Angeles, my friend and I ranked which zodiac sign makes the best guacamole.

“Libra would make the prettiest guacamole and forget the recipe halfway through.”

“Yeah but Scorpio’s guacamole would kill you and you’d thank her for it.”

Traffic stacked up around Disneyland, where conversation slipped toward the absurd. We mourned the ferret who broke into the Hadron Collider—some innocent furry little fool who gnawed the wrong wire and got flash-fried by the same machine built to crack the code of the universe. Riding the lightning straight into the void.

"Poor little guy," my friend said.

"At least he went out doing something big," I said.

Me and my girlfriends who cross the border together; we’re just ferrets chewing through the wrong wires, hurtling toward something we don't understand, playing chicken with physics and filler, hoping there's a doorway on the other side instead of a blast of light and nothing. Our lives stitched together with jokes, beauty road trips, and the thin desperate thread of hope that somehow, we’re not too late.

Are we?

Caroline Ryder is a #1 New York Times bestselling ghostwriter, journalist, and screenwriter (WGA) based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Dazed, AnOther, The Face, and New York Magazine. She has ghostwritten memoirs including Dirty Rocker Boys (named one of Rolling Stone’s 50 Greatest Rock Memoirs) and The House of My Mother with Shari Franke, a #1 New York Times bestseller.

She still believes in art, truth, and the beauty of human imperfection.

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@carolineryderwriter

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