kitsy killed herself in the laundry.

kitsy being the previous person to rent the house evan shares with susie and anna. it happened 6 months ago and the laundry in question is *the* laundry, in *the* house. yes, the laundry that had a surprising amount of insects that seemed to come from nowhere when we first cleaned the place just before christmas. the laundry that goes off from their big kitchen.

i'm not surprised.

evan's right-hand neighbour, an adorable lady called sue, had taken me out on a guided tour through town and for lunch and coffee back in january, and had told me about the people who had lived in evan's house before.
of kitsy, she had spoken in the past tense, had instructed me to give any mail for kitsy to yet another neighbour who would "send it home to kitsy's mom in the us", and uttered lots that basically described kitsy as a mentally ill, drug abusing woman in her thirties, who had had an abundance of problems, who couldn't look after her young son, who lived with his dad in melbourne.
i can't put down what exactly made me believe kitsy had killed herself, but i just got the vibe from it all. i never asked sue outright whether kitsy had committed suicide, but the night after sue had taken me out, i told evan about my impression that kitsy had killed herself.

and indeed, she has. in the laundry.

the left-hand neighbour, a bloke i never met, saw evan yesterday and noticed his cast, and asked whether he, had fallen prey to the "spell that's on the house", which - according to him- had caused multiple broken bones, and well "then the suicide, too".
so evan asked "which suicide?" and left-hand neighbour was way too happy to share the details of kitsys death. what an idiot, indeed.

it's unclear whether kitsy actually intended to kill herself or not. - she died of a drug overdose. it apparently took a few days until she was discovered, in the laundry, because she had led such an isolated life.

susie is freaked about this having happened in her house a mere 6 months ago and wants to move out now.
apparently, when susie walked into the house for the first time, with the real estate agent and evan and two more friends, she didn't like it at all and felt that something was wrong about it.

fact is, i never thought the house had a particularly good vibe, either. it's a pretty place in a great location, but i wouldn't have chosen it, for the beige carpets, and the curtains and the vibe - it felt loveless, sterile, not lived in, and i had somehow gotten the impression that the departure had been very sudden and sloppy. i can't put my finger on what exactly gave me that impression... maybe the forgotten buddha in the backyard, maybe the coat hangers in the built in robes, maybe the nails in the walls. something about the house felt like someone other then the person living there had packed, which was -as it turns out- the case after all.

i specifically didn't like the kitchen on first entrance. the entire right hand side of it, the one where the laundry door is. it just didn't feel very comfortable at all, from the very first moment, when the house was still empty. - it got even worse when susie had put her ugly giant table in that part of the room. - i preferred having meals in the living room or outside. i talked about it back then, too, how it felt sterile and cold and empty. which it did.

i always left the door to the laundry open, because the glass door from the laundry to the backyard would bring some extra light into that bad-chi corner of the kitchen. i tried to repair the broken french blinds on the laundry backyard door for even more light, but failed.
in contrast to that, susie always closed the door to the laundry. in 35 degree weather, she attempted drying her clothes in the cool, closed laundry.
i always dried the clothing outside in the backyard, leaving all doors open to let the sun and air (and the spiders) in.

probably all just coincidental, really, combined with me being sensitive to the feel of the place, nothing more.

i don't believe in ghosts, at all. never have, never will. i don't think life and death and this world function this way.

i do believe in life energy of some form, call it chi if you want. - and something about the chi of the kitchen and laundry wasn't right, who knows why. while i was there, i tried to fix whatever gave the kitchen and laundry a bad chi, not knowing what exactly was wrong.
but now that i do know, what was wrong, that someone had died, and others had packed, doesn't change a thing about my feelings for the house in general. it's a bnice house in a great location, and even though i wouldn't have picked it myself, i would live there, despite the carpets, despite the curtains, despite kitsy's death.

actually i find it quite sad that there were no real markers about what had happened. about who kitsy was. there were no clues, no real leftovers of kitsy's life, apart from aforementioned buddha figure, the coat hangers and the mail and the magazines (esquire, time, shipped from the us) that kept arriving for her.
the little she impacted the house, the little she impacted those around her, apparently, living in seclusion. she hardly left an imprint on those who lived around her and didn't let them. - sue apparently tried hard to connect to her but for her left-hand neighbour bloke she was apparently no one, nothing. - otherwise he wouldn't have abused her for the poor joke and an attempt to scare evan with the "spell that's on the house". how ridiculous.
i googled kitsy in an effort to find out more, to no avail.

why be scared because you know someone died in the house? why be scared because it might have been suicide?
the only drama about this all is how sad and depressed and alone kitsy must have been in this pretty place, in that pretty suburb, in that town, with such a great neighbour like sue next door. it's sad she either decided or by accident took too much of whatever poison was her choice. that's the entire drama of this, nothing else.

it startles me, that susie is so freaked now. if the death of a person in a certain room affects her that much, how can she even enter the hospital every day? i'm also startled that evan started talking about fear at night and ghosts. sure, i don't live in the house right now, but what's this all about? sure, the house's vibe wasn't great in my opinion, but evan always loved it, and never had a doubt about it, ever. so why now, i wonder? because of someone dying?

and i wonder whether hearing of a death that happened to someone we never knew in our home has such a shock value because we're so far removed from the beginnings and ends of life these days. we are born and we die in hospitals. anything besides that is out of order.

i'm not trying to make suicide sound like normal death. it isn't.
i can wholeheartedly understand anyone instantly wanting to move out of the home where a family member killed her/himself.
a schoolmate of mine found his dad in the cellar after he had shot himself in the head. a long-time friend of my mom died several years ago in a suicidal looking situation (she had been an alcoholic and had been on a binge mixed with meds and had then gotten a heart attack), naked on her kitchen floor.
not wanting to live in a house or flat where someone you've loved was so desperate, so lost, is something i can understand, wholeheartedly. and as mentioned before, being human, i feel compassion for kitsy, who was so lost and desperate in her home, too, which is now evan's home.
however, kitsy's death, no death ever spoils a place. plenty of people kill themselves by throwing themselves from sydney harbours south head, or jumping from melbourne's westgate bridge. - it changes people's thoughts about a place, but does not change a place, per se. whether that's good or bad is debatable.
i recently read alice sebold's "the lonely bones" in which ruth feels places where women were killed...for her, passing by places where lives were ended is unbearable.
i'll never forget visiting sachsenhausen concentration camp with my blind mate ben. it was a ghastly cold winter day, and the impact it had was visual, physical and emotional. i read out something for the group we were there with, and cried, because it affected me so much. ben, however, despite what i read out, despite what he knew had happened there, felt that sachsenhausen was peaceful. he couldn't see the barracks, the writings in the gate, the images of the bodies in the underground cellars. he knew they were there, touched the barracks, the ovens, but overall to him, being unable to see it, sachsenhausen felt peaceful, holy, sacred. - sachsenhausen being a place were thousands of people were tortured, killed and burned. the atrocities had not changed the feel of the place for a blind visitor.

kitsy isn't a ghost sneaking around the house. there are no sad memories of her around, which -as i've mentioned, is sad in its own way.

i think the strangeness, the lack of flow, of chi in that part of the house (and some other areas, too) came mainly from the lovelessness of the house, caused by her death and the move arranged by others in a haste. the house still had that lovelessness after evan and susie had moved in with all that furniture they hated, with all the mixed-upness and lack of loving and care and those beige carpets and curtains.
while i was there, i tried hard to get rid of it with cleaning and care and straightening, but some things, you can not change with that alone.

my flat had a lovelessness about it, too, when i first had a look at it. - the girl who lived here before me was very unhappy, got unexpectedly pregnant in here (but is happy now: saw her and her daughter a little while ago), broke up from her abusive boyfriend. i changed it rapidly, with all the love my dad and i put into it when renovating, with all the colour i put in. it's my place now, completely mine.
the fact someone else was unhappy here doesn't mean i have to be unhappy, too.

quite sad that evan's house will now never be a love-filled space, with susie hating it for no other reason but it being the place of kitsy's death.