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Eleven years ago I turned twenty-two. By this time, two of my three sisters were dead. The first was killed by an ex-boyfriend. She was found strangled and face smashed. Her body had been left for three days in an empty apartment. Her corpse was found only because the neighbors could smell her body rotting in the New York City heat. The second was killed by grief, trauma, isolation, and alcohol. To be clear, it was not the second sister’s body that died, just the person that I knew—the one who had once been my whole world.

I want to be able to tell you a story about these deaths, yet it also seems reductive—to attempt to fabricate meaning and symbolism out of something as complex and contradictory as a life. When the first sister, Amahle,* died, we all tried to make meaning out of it. Her death became the way we fell apart. We told stories about her to comfort ourselves—stories to make meaning out of her death, her life. I don’t want to reduce Amahle’s life, her death, my grief into stories. But I also must admit that I’m a storyteller. I don’t know how to tell without telling stories. So instead of telling one story about Amahle’s death, I will tell you several.

“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us,” Rebecca Solnit once wrote. My sister Karina and I were once great storytellers. When we were young, we were our only world. We were all that mattered. We called our world Ivclonia, which meant Land of the Fairies. We planned to make it into an animated film eventually. We tried to write our world down into a book. Half I wrote; half she wrote. I don’t remember who wrote what. She wound up taking over and creating newer darker worlds without me.

In our first rendition, the fairies save the children, and then the children save the fairies back. In our world, the children and the fairies both got to be heroes, and they both got to be saved.

But at some point, the ending changed. The fairies were all killed. The children, in their innocent quest to find Ivclonia and help the fairies, unknowingly created a trail that other humans later followed. Of course, the humans only wanted the magic for themselves. The one remaining fairy was fed to a human, who became a new, very evil species that set off a new, very dark period.

Years later, after our worlds and our sisterhood had fallen apart, I looked everywhere for these worlds, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Looking back at our revised ending, I wonder if there was something our imaginations knew that the rest of us didn’t. A darkness on the horizon.

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality.
We create it to be able to stay.

—LYNDA BARRY

In 2001, Karina came home from the first day of her summer school program and announced that she had just met a girl named Amahle who thought that everything was hilarious. I was sixteen. Karina and Amahle were both freshmen. According to Karina, they had just decided to become friends on that day, which was Amahle’s birthday—or the anniversary, as they would soon refer to it. When Karina met Amahle, I was jealous. I am ashamed to admit this, but it’s true. Karina had found a new best friend, and it wasn’t me.

The first time I really hung out with Amahle, the three of us were in my parents’ room watching television when this Walmart commercial came on with a yellow smiley face that suddenly started singing. The singing smile became so big that it eventually covered the entire face and almost the entire screen. Karina and I thought it was pretty trite, but Amahle just sat there cracking up—just like Karina said she would—and she wouldn’t stop. Even though the jokes were never actually funny, I was always a little jealous that I couldn’t see the humor in everyday events the way that she could.

Amahle was the only person besides Karina who knew about my imaginary boyfriend. People would see us in the halls and ask if we three were sisters, and so we were. Just like that, Amahle entered our world.

When I went to my senior prom, Amahle and Karina were jealous that I had a prom to go to and they didn’t. I didn’t tell them that I didn’t want to go—that I didn’t have any friendships quite like theirs at school, or anywhere else for that matter. It would’ve been too uncool. They made their own “prom” video where they dressed up in my clothes and danced around the house and showed it to me the next day. I still believe that their night was more fun than mine, and they agreed.

One story is this: Amahle died eleven years ago. And when she did, I lost my best friend.

I should clarify that Amahle was not my best friend. She was Karina’s, and Karina was mine. And when Karina lost Amahle, I lost them both. One I lost literally, and one I lost in another way.

Sometimes when a person dies, they start to live inside you, and you look to them and away from the people in your life.

Sometimes when a person gets taken over by grief, their face transforms, their eyes become glass; you wave your hand over their eyes to see if their face still registers your presence.

The first story of Amahle’s death is the simplest one. It is where I was when she died.

Of course I couldn’t have known that the day I chose to leave my home in New York City to volunteer for a year in Honduras would wind up being just one day before my sister by water and not by blood would be killed by a man who once slept in my house, whom I cooked eggs for. It is a day that I replay in my head again and again. Amahle, the water sister, and I were on the phone. She wanted Karina, my sister by blood, and me to attend a party. I was packing my bags to leave the country. Karina stayed to help. I would be gone for a year. It would be the longest I’d ever spent away from home.

“A year goes by so fast. We’ll see each other in no time,” Amahle said. I tried to hide my longing to see her by performing cheeriness—a defense mechanism of mine. Her voice had a familiar loud optimism that often made me wonder if we shared the same defense mechanism. This was the last time I would ever speak to Amahle.

I had recently graduated from college and I was too young and naïve to understand the arrogant blindness of leaving your country to go volunteer, to “help” people in another country with a different culture and language. Looking back on this year, I can see more clearly now that even my desire to help others was more about me than them. I wanted to be important. I wanted to be remembered. I wanted to be good at something. I thought maybe I was good at helping. In August 2007, I signed a yearlong contract. My family gave me their blessing.

The day I got the news was the day the girl known to staff simply as malcriado threw stones at my face for being a sope—the word they used for vulture—because we shared the same color skin. I was the only Black volunteer on the ranch. The few Black children there were quick to denounce their African ancestry because of years of colonial conditioning. It was my fifth day living at the orphanage. The phone connection was so bad I could only hear every other word. “What?” I kept asking. The only word I could make out for sure was “dead.” Finally, I heard the other word: “Amahle.”

This is the story the world made of her death. My family didn’t tell me how Amahle died because they didn’t want to worry me. I spent the next twelve hours on the internet searching for clues. There were pictures of her in every newspaper: the New York Times, New York Daily News, Village Voice. Often she was pictured with him—the man who killed her—looking young and in love. She was shown with cheap drinks in her hand, the dark makeup she started wearing more often, and a spark of teenage recklessness in her eyes. Newspapers by nature are meant to create a narrative—a progression of order and logic—out of facts that may not make true sense. Here is some of what they said:

An unemployed and sometimes homeless security guard charged with strangling the daughter of New York University professors told investigators that he had been jealous because she invited other men but not him to her party, prosecutors said in court papers released yesterday. —New York Times

Amahle (20) was murdered and found rotting in her Greenwich Village apartment surrounded by condom wrappers.—New York Post

A guy I remembered only as a pothead I went to high school with was in film school and wanted to know if he could interview me for the documentary he was making; it can now be found on IMDb.com. The tagline reads: “A documentary about a young woman murdered by her former boyfriend in New York in 2007 told through home movies, stills, and interviews with her family and friends.”

A chilling account of pure innocence marred by pure evil! —anonymous IMDb commenter

I was on the plane back to New York for the memorial. I couldn’t afford to go to the funeral in South Africa. The woman sitting next to me told me about how she’d just read the most horrible news story in the New York Times about a beautiful woman killed in her NYU apartment by her crazy ex-boyfriend.

Imagine a whole life suddenly summed up in rumors and adjectives: “party girl,” “binge drinker,” “daddy issues.” The girl pictured and written about in the news articles resembled my friend—but was different. They made her look shallow, hollow, asking for trouble.

This is the story they always tell about women who are raped and killed by the men in their lives. I want to blame the media, but I wonder why it is that we keep wanting to be told this story. The story tells us that there must always be a reason they died. There must be something to separate the women who die from the women who don’t—because the idea that it can truly happen to any of us, that our world does not make sense, is too troubling for most of us to accept entirely.

Even the man’s defense lawyer wept. So did the man as he turned to apologize to the family. “I know what I did was wrong,” he said. Yet he failed to offer an explanation for the brutal crime. “It was just something that happened,” he shrugged, after declaring his undying love for the victim. —New York Daily News

I logged on to Facebook later that day and, just hours after hearing the news, received the following message: “Hi, my name is Meredith Leitch. I work for North Star magazine. I’m messaging all of Amahle’s Facebook friends wondering if you could give me some information on your take of the murder. When did you sense that the man who killed Amahle was capable of such vile atrocities?”

When I close my eyes, I replay my last conversation with Amahle. I change the ending. Karina and I finish packing early and make it to Amahle’s party after all. We spend the night at her place, as we often did. When the man who killed her arrives the next morning, Karina and I are there to protect her. The man feels nervous having so many witnesses and decides not to go through with it—or he tries to attack and we call security downstairs and they rush in with guns—or we find her right after he leaves and there’s still time and we rush her to the hospital. The doctor tells us she’s in stable condition; it was a miracle.

When you’re far away when someone dies, it’s like they’re not really dead. I never saw the body. Where I was, nobody knew Amahle. I fell asleep hearing her voice at night. When I closed my eyes, I swore I could feel her everywhere. I woke up every morning thinking maybe, just maybe, there was still time to save her.

There are times even now when I still don’t believe that she’s really dead.

One time at a party, I got drunk and decided to slap the man who would eventually kill her in the face. I didn’t know what had come over me. I had a feeling about him, a terrible feeling that I never shared with anyone whenever I saw the man. I’d be lying if I said I knew he would kill her. But I would also be lying if I said that I ever thought she was safe with him.

We’d only heard about one prior incident. About a month before Amahle died, the man who killed her stole her passport and dragged her across the ground by her hair outside of her dorm room. There were many witnesses. This was the first time we had proof that the man was physically abusive.

When she went to the police to get her passport back they told her there was nothing they could do. They looked at the bruises across her arms and legs and told her they needed more facts before investigating the situation. She decided to leave him. We were relieved. We thought the worst was behind us.

A study on intimate partner violence (IPV) states that one in ten IPV-related homicide victims “experienced some form of violence in the month before their death, suggesting an opportunity for intervention.” It is a fact that makes you go back and retrace all of the possible interventions you could have made.

I try to convince myself over and over again that even if I didn’t get on that plane to Honduras, even if we did go to her party that night, even if we were there when the man came to the door, that we might not have been able to stop him, that he might’ve killed us too.

But most of the time I think it’s me who killed her.

I too want to make sense of her death. If there was truly nothing I could have done, why do I still want to save her? Maybe selflessness is like martyrdom, like a masochist in disguise. The advice dating violence prevention organizations always give is never tell a battered woman to leave her batterer. But once she’s dead that’s all you’ll ever wish you did.

One of the last memories I have of Amahle was when I went to stay with her and Karina in Karina’s college apartment. Amahle had recently split open her leg, attempting to climb through the window to the roof. Her entire leg had turned purple. I thought she might need stitches. It was unsettling—watching the wide-openness of her smile contrasted with her purple leg. She was so happy that she’d finally broken things off with the man who would kill her. She changed her phone number, her Myspace and Facebook passwords. She was a free woman. “Everything will be different now,” she said. “You’ll see.”

Of course, the reason that they tell you not to tell a survivor to leave their abuser—besides the fact that it won’t work—is that the moment the victim leaves her abuser is actually the most likely time for her to be killed by them. This is the reason for things like safety planning, domestic violence shelters, name changes. Had we known this, maybe we could have tried harder to convince her not to be in that apartment by herself all summer. Maybe we could have taken her somewhere that he could never find her. All we could tell in that moment was that she should leave. And I can’t help but think that if we had spent more time listening, less time anxiously wanting her to leave him, that maybe we could have saved her.

This is where I was when Karina died. We were sitting in her bedroom. Sketches of the new fairy world she had created called Mitra were on the ground, on the walls, growing upwards. They were all you could see. Like a scene from Where the Wild Things Are, her room had become a blueprint for her mind—both an escape and a means to stay in the world where her best friend was dead.

In this period, I rarely saw her leave her room, but there were remnants left of her throughout our house. Like a ghost, she haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking she might be next. I had dreams of waking up to headlines like the ones I found about Amahle, summing up her life with empty descriptors:

Here lies Karina, age 23, found rotting, in her childhood bedroom, watching Korean soap operas.

I don’t know how to explain it, but every tragedy, every death, somehow reminded me of her. The comparisons had become absurd.

I watched Hotel Rwanda and the mass grave of children took on Karina’s face.

How do you tell someone you feel you lost them when someone else is truly dead in a coffin somewhere without sounding selfish and insane?

The day our sisterhood died I sat down next to her, looked for some trace of her inside her face, but I did not see Karina there. It was like when I was young and she was just born, and I would sometimes worry that her body had been taken over by an alien. I’d look at her face until I was convinced it was her. If I wasn’t convinced, I would cry until our parents came.

This time, years later, I looked at her. I said her name, “Karina,” and she looked back at me, expressionless. She looked like she’d been abducted again. This time by grief.

I thought about Amahle. How many times had I wanted to tell her to leave him? I never told Amahle to leave the man who killed her. I never told her parents. I never told mine. I never told her how much the man scared me. I never even told her that I would miss her when I was in Honduras.

It’s only now that I realize my fear over losing Karina was really a mask for my guilt over losing Amahle. I thought if I could save Karina, I would be saving Amahle too.

I decided to show our parents the bottles under Karina’s bed. They asked me why I hadn’t told them sooner. They told me now it was too late; Karina was already gone. My mother threw away Karina’s drawings. They poured out the bottles from under her bed.

Shortly after, Karina and I collided. She felt betrayed I told our parents. But I felt betrayed too.

When amahle died, Karina told me that she had to stop dancing because it reminded her too much of Amahle. We didn’t dance together again for some time. I wanted to say, “But wasn’t it you who taught me to dance? Who insisted we record our performances to show to our family before we even knew Amahle existed?” I felt betrayed by this because I had danced with Karina first. This is clear to me now. I didn’t want Karina to love a person more than she loved me, and I wondered if this made me no different from the man who killed Amahle after learning that she did not wish to belong to him.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved.

—TONI MORRISON

The man who killed Amahle wrote her poetry every day. Amahle called him passionate. The newspapers called her death a crime of passion.

The word “passion” comes from the Latin verb “to suffer” or “to endure.” Passion is an “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction; an outbreak of anger, something that differentiates from reason.” In the Bible, “the Passion” refers to the suffering that Christ endured between the Last Supper and his death.

I want to know a more radical form of loving than this. But it is difficult to love in any way that is different from the way you yourself have been loved.

The man who killed Amahle had lost both his parents, had been failed by the state, had lived on the streets, had been in and out of jail, had been labeled a criminal by so many in his life, including me.

The New York Post referred to the man as a beast and to Amahle as “the beauty.” And although I can see through the classism and racism that dehumanized the man in these articles, and presumably throughout his life, it is hard for me to see him the way Amahle saw him—as completely and fully human. It is hard for me to want to. Even now, I cannot bear to tell you his name. I don’t wish to see it written here. I don’t wish to hear it repeated back to me in conversations.

I can see clearly how loving someone in a certain way can be passionate, can be violent, can be a hatred storming inside you. Had I seen the man who killed her the day I got the news, I would have tried to kill him myself. And I think that the very idea that people who do bad things should go to prison to be punished—to serve justice—comes from the pleasure we get in seeing those who have wronged us suffer.

Yet, still, I remember seeing a photo of the man in court with his sister, whom he had been staying with when he was homeless. I heard that his sister was pregnant at the time. Her face looked broken. I wondered what it must have been like to be this woman: to lose her parents, to grow up without financial stability, to be seen by society as the daughter of a “welfare queen”—only to lose her brother to a distorted, heartbroken rage. A rage that probably could have been avoided had he not lived in a world that criminalized him from the day he was born. I saw the heartbreak in her face. I thought, What would her face have looked like if I had killed him?

The day I collided with Karina, I was heartbroken that I was losing her. Yet in the process of trying to save her, I nearly killed her too. Our fight ended with me throwing a glass vase at her face, which broke and cut an artery in her arm and landed her in the emergency room. The doctor told her that if the glass had gone in any deeper, she would have died on her way to the hospital.

When my brother came home, he said our kitchen looked like a murder scene. Glass and blood were everywhere.

The truth is that I don’t remember throwing the vase at all. My mind has blanked it out entirely.

All I remember is the pain I felt that I had been keeping inside me all that time and that exploded on my sister that day in our kitchen. If I had killed her, I would be the monster too. Not sitting here writing this essay, working with high school students on conflict de-escalation.

After the fight, my parents said to me, “This isn’t like you. We need you to be the strong one here. We need you to be the glue.”

I found a journal entry that I wrote to record my feelings that day:

I am still afraid of falling asleep at night and watching her drown. Even as glue I cannot hold her. You cannot save someone who wants to stay in the water.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I like the waves as they wash over me. That numb feeling the water gives me, the redness in my eyes from the salty salt. I like it down here. No, I don’t want to come up for air.”

And so I let her drown.

Even as glue I could not save her.

The thing they don’t tell you about death is that everyone blames themselves and each other, and suddenly you’re not a family anymore.

The thing about Black families is they go on forever. Every friend becomes an auntie. Amahle became a sister, and sister a soul mate.

When Amahle died, we blamed ourselves, each other, and even Amahle herself for dying. Karina kept Amahle’s ashes in an urn that she wore around her neck for years.

All I keep are memories. Something I cannot hold.

I can only find one photo of me and Amahle. It was the time we did a modeling shoot for a friend where we lay on a bathroom floor pouring water over our faces. It is not a great photo, but it is the one tangible piece of our friendship that I have. I keep it on my desktop.

Rebecca Solnit wrote that sometimes our stories tell us, and I think the story I needed to be told was that Amahle’s death was never my fault, that she knew how much I loved her, that she was okay now, somewhere he could never hurt her.

But what are the stories Amahle told about herself?

On her Myspace page Amahle wrote that her first name “means happiness, which I guess fits my personality, ’cause I laugh really loud and obnoxiously—all the time. I’m a South African baby.”

This was on Amahle’s Facebook profile the day she died: “Over the last year I have developed a ZERO-tolerance for bullshit, so please take that shit elsewhere! (No exceptions). I love my friends and family who are ALWAYS there for me! They mean everything to me!! I’m a friendly person, but don’t be fooled into mistaking it for weakness!”

Below was this quote from Audre Lorde: “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.”

Amahle did not want to die. She was passionate about prisoners’ rights and dreamed of becoming president. She wanted to travel and to love and to be loved deeply. I don’t think she ever thought the man who killed her would do it. But maybe she knew that he could. Or that like the time she went to the police when he stole her passport, the systems were stacked against her, that there was little she could do.

Still, it’s alarming the number of people I’ve met who blame Amahle for her death.

In reality, of course, the leading cause of death for American women is that their boyfriends and husbands kill them. And Black women make up the highest percentage of casualties.

But as Black women, we also know how to hold each other to the light. When I told Karina I was writing this essay, she told me not to show it to her because she didn’t want to read it. But she also told me that she needed me to write this essay.

A funny thing that happens when you stop trying to save people is that they start to save themselves. A few years ago, Karina moved out of New York, began a new healthy relationship, went back to school, managed a 4.0 GPA, started exercising, bought a dog, and began regularly doing monthly health cleanses.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to tell you a story, that I wanted to make Amahle’s life and death mean something to you as a reader, that I wanted you to be entertained by these words. Yet here we are with a happy ending.

Karina was never dead. She was mourning, which I saw as a death. I was mourning, but without allowing myself to acknowledge my grief, I became my own killer. Karina’s killer too.

Our fight forced us to confront each other and our own heartbreak in ways we hadn’t done before. Karina and I were forced to create new worlds. At first I thought I lost her to hers. And then a bridge was created and we walked over to meet one another there.

Karina is the first person I think of when I feel that I am nothing. And every summer—during the season when Amahle died—Karina and I celebrate Sisters Day. A day we created when we celebrate our lives, our friendship. When we try to reenter a world where fairies can be saved by children and violence and death can be prevented by believing in magic, in love, and in sisters.

* All names have been changed.