The Human Chandelier

A girl you know is dead. You are typing on her computer right now. Your fingers move over the keys she once tapped, finishing the manuscript you have been working tirelessly on over the past eleven months to try to make sense of what happened to her; a way to make peace with your role in why it did. But while the title bears her name, it’s yours that continues to carry the burden of your guilt, for it was your daisy chain that was pulled taut around her neck.

A girl you know is dead. After 11 months you’d think you might be able to forget, because your logical brain knows that you will never see her again. Your trauma brain, however, tells a different tale and the possibility of seeing her body jolts your subconscious mind awake. When you close your eyes and she haunts you. When you open them the anticipation of what you might find masked in the shadows has tainted the safest spaces of your existence. Her image comes in the form of a dark navy blue Hogwarts bathrobe that hangs menacingly from a hook on the back of your bedroom door, hides in the shadows of a dark room, lurks behind a closed door. Your whole body reacts at any given moment against your will, not to the image in front of you, but to an image of the past, hanging in front of your eyes and ripping away any sense of peace. Panic sets in and as fear takes over your thoughts, the downward spiral begins. First with vigor as it assaults your vision with images of a tiny silhouette clothed in black, dangling as if in mid air. This is when you squeeze your eyes shut, hard, and rather than erase the image from your minds eye, you recall the exact moment you saw her. In these moments you allow yourself to indulge in the memory, knowing that you will be upset by its presence, but also knowing that the power of the imagery, of what you saw and how you felt, is at least familiar. What might be hiding behind your shower curtain is unknown, but her image is not. And if you let yourself investigate the scene in small spurts, if you try to remember new pieces of information that could help you piece together the mystery of the crime scene, maybe, just maybe you will be able to reconcile with what happened because you hold yourself responsible.

You had hired her two weeks before as your new studio manager for SkyFlower, your soon-to-open aerial yoga studio, and noting her sweatshirt that had the logo of a wheat symbol inside of a circle that read “gluten free is the way to be” underneath it—at least that is how you remember it—letting you know she suffered from celiac disease. You had self-imposed every dietary restriction possible and you wanted to get to know your new hire outside of working hours and made plans to have dinner the next night at your favorite Gluten-Free restaurant the following week. You canceled on her and went with another friend instead because you didn’t feel like “working”. Ya, some yogi you are.

You tried to make it up to her by going over the top all week…more than even your people pleasing ass would normally go because you felt guilty about canceling on her and lying about it, and your guilt at being a liar to a dying woman is severe.

After that guilty conscience surrendered you remember hugging her less than 24 hours before as you held back tears during your short embrace, not because you knew of her impending fate, but rather because you were in complete debt to her. She had come to you at a time when you were losing faith in yourself and your business’ future, and she had single handedly redirected and reinsured you. You were letting her know that you appreciated her and that you would always take care of her, no matter what, helping her find her way to her dreams in any way you could. Of course now you cannot recall what these dreams were.

In the days before she died you look back and wonder if certain behaviors might have been warning signs. You hired her to be your right hand and help you to run SkyFlower Yoga, knew she had been a dancer and a pilates instructor, that she had a degree in both Mathematics and Dance, and that she was new to the city after a bad breakup with a long-term boyfriend. She was a tiny thing, with short hair and clear framed glasses, and the night before she died, the same night you hugged her and she pulled away a little bit too quickly, you noticed the tattoo on her wrist freshly inked and asked her about it.

“I just had it redone,” she explained, not smiling but with pride. “It says, Ahimsa.”

“Non-violence.” You reply, knowing the concept well as it was the principle of your Bhakti background which started your journey of self-compassion, one that has waned in the last year, understandably.

You had this exchange right before she received a text message that seemed to upset her before excusing herself to the bathroom. And then you left her there to go home to sleep. What else could you have done? You had worked all day, and it was 11pm, and you were tired. And when she asked if she could stay, and hang out, which is what one does in an aerial yoga studio where you can turn your frown upside down, you thought it odd, in fact you almost refused, but you wanted you new studio manager to feel at home in your soon-to-open SkyFlower NYC, your brand new business, your livelihood, your baby. So you obliged and told her to feel free to hang out and make herself at home. And she she did just that. Permanently. 

The following is a snowy January day and you arrived at your yoga studio to meet your new manager, and are surprised to find it locked. From the inside. The lock for which you have the only key. Your headphones are blasting Diplo’s “Be Right There, hyping you up for your opening night so you don’t pay enough attention to the sign.

“Hello?” You say mindlessly as you fight with the lock that sticks making it terribly difficult to retrieve the key. “Hellooooooo.” You sing-song this time as the door finally swings open and you see the breathtaking art-deco chandelier, its many crystals that you painstakingly hung, one by one, eerily reflecting the darkening daylight. It’s reaching dusk, the witching hour, and each crystal casts its prism like beam onto the mirror directly in front of you, causing your heart rate to quicken, ever so slightly, because the chandelier—it should be illuminated.

You finally retrieve the key and when you look back up you start to form her name on your lips, “Kristel?” As you are confronted with a silhouette that appears to be hanging from one of your precious hammocks, one of your lifelines. Your mind sees the image at first as something that make sense, perhaps your studio manager is just deep in meditation, hanging upside down from the silks as you do in your studio every day. But her feet are pointing downwards, and that is not the way the hammocks work and you feel confused and disoriented and you try again, louder this time shouting her name, “Kristel” with more urgency as the door swings shut behind you and you realize that you are not the only body in the room.

So you scream, so loudly that you swear you see her black skirt sway in the dim light, because the image finally registers, and you realize that the girl you had taken under your wing, that you had placed your trust and livelihood in, is dangling, lifeless, from a slate-gray daisy-chain two feet away from you. You see her pale face and greasy short hair, dark clothes that encase her and while in your memory she sways in the shadows but in reality her body is completely still. 

A girl you know is dead in front of you and for a moment you wonder was there an accident? Was there foul play? Are you in danger? You run through these possibilities until you see the stool and realize that this was done with planning and intention. The locked door, the extinguished light, the glasses missing, the feet only inches from the cold metal bar stool which could have found solid ground if the will had been there.

You realize all of this within less than a second, and remembering CSI and Law and Order you watched as a kid, you stop screaming her name, and start screaming for help as you back out the door the way that you came, and for the very last time. You dial 911 and collapse as your upstairs neighbor rushes down the stairs and hears you say in broken speech that a girl has hung herself.

The frustration of not knowing each specific detail of the scene of her crime with confidence drives you crazy. You can picture her face and her hair and the position of her body, you can see the scene, the stage that she set just for you, but the things unknown are enough to fill an ocean, and you will never know what really happened but that doesn’t stop your mind from wandering, from filing in the holes with your own ideas of what might have occurred based on your limited detective skills and traumatized memory. The fact that she chose you to find her, she picked your studio, your daisy chain, your stool to carry out her death means that you are in some way a part of it, no matter how far you try to run from it. But your legs are going to get tired of running and you need to come to terms with that, before they do because you will never really know what happened between the time she stood up from the leather yellow desk chair and the time she stepped off of the gray metal bar stool.

Did she know from the moment you hired her that this would be where she would take her final bow? Your memory feels unreliable, and the frustration of not knowing each specific detail of the scene of her crime with confidence drives you crazy and the more and more you try to fill in those gaps, the more you wonder what you did wrong.

But you know logically this wasn’t your fault. She placed a barstool under a gray daisy chain hanging from a wooden beam in your soon to be open aerial studio and with her physics brain fashioned a noose out of a gray yoga strap, knowing it would self tighten. You do wonder why she didn’t use a choke loop, but perhaps her head wouldn’t fit through it. She picked a spot just in front of the door so that when you opened it, before you could walk around to turn the light switch, you see her, hanging from your beloved apparatus, the apparatus that you had built your life around. You know these things because they are tangible, but you will never know if that was her message to you to stop the opening, that you had helped her reach the decision that life was not worth living, or perhaps, just maybe you were just a safe place for her to find peace after a lifetime of pain. 

But because of the unknowing each moment, each interaction, each exchange, each tone shift, each undocumented occurrence that happened between you and her preceding her death feels like it has a place in a well choreographed dance towards her end. That is why you see her silhouette, floating in the evening dusk, hanging like a ghost, in her day old clothes, centered with the chandelier that defined your brand, and every time you do, you can’t help but think she set her final stage specifically for you, and so while you still don’t know whose name will be on the cover, or whose burden will be carried in its pages, you know logically that her death is not your fault, so maybe it’s time to forgive Kristel Rose, to forgive yourself, and to stop misplacing the blame.