When God was a Rabbit

by Sarah Winman

I’d already resolved that if this God couldn’t love me, then it was clear I’d need to find another one that could.

Everything was a secret and I guarded each one like a brittle egg.

‘Without a reason, why bother? Existence needs purpose: to be able to endure the pain of life with dignity; to give us a reason to continue. The meaning must enter our hearts, not our heads. We must understand the meaning of our suffering.’

‘He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how ,’

‘A Belgian hare,’ I repeated quietly, as if I’d just said words that were the equivalent to love .

But all I could see was a boy, where once I would have been.

She was whole. And when she opened her eyes, I think she knew it too.

Something unnatural held their world together and it was a feeling that, at that age, I couldn’t yet put a word to. My brother said it was probably the braided twine of heartbreak. Of disappointment. Of regret. I was too young to disagree. Or to fully understand.

She was always like that: grateful for life itself. Her glass was not only half full, it was gold plated with a permanent refill.

for even in death it said, ‘I won’t let go.’ Won’t let go .

The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name no one acknowledged.

I didn’t follow them straight away. I let her have her moment. That uninterrupted moment when she could dream and believe that all I had was hers.

It was left to Nancy and me to pick up the pieces that my brother had become; to resurrect his shrunken spirit and pull his pale tear-stained face from beneath his pillow and give sense to a world that had given him none: he loved, yet wasn’t loved back.

I felt the air sucked out of my lungs like life itself.

I wanted to be liked. But I was an outsider. And people didn’t miss outsiders.

‘Nothing stays forgotten for long, Elly. Sometimes we simply have to remind the world that we’re special and that we’re still here.’

His life meant more to me than anything, and now his death did, for it left an anguished hole impossible to fill.

‘Memories,’ she said to me, ‘no matter how small or inconsequential, are the pages that define us.’

Do I believe in a mystery; the unexplained phenomenon that is life itself? The greater something that illuminates inconsequence in our lives; that gives us something to strive for as well as the humility to brush ourselves down and start all over again? Then yes, I do. It is the source of art, of beauty, of love, and proffers the ultimate goodness to mankind. That to me is God. That to me is life. That is what I believe in.’

‘There is absolutely no reason at all why a rabbit should not be God.’

Concrete is god

And there between the letters I saw her again on the pavement in her favourite shoes, waving and receding, when she was nine, when I was nine, and when we vowed to keep in touch.

Those were the sole moments that gave away his age; chinks in the armour of our eternal boy.

‘There’s a new star tonight,’ my brother would have said, had I been younger, had he been there; and for forty minutes I looked for it. But I had become too old. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Where she had been, was now just space.

The witness of my soul, my shadow in childhood, when dreams were small and attainable

And he uncovered in us a curious need: that we each secretly wanted him to remember us the most. It was strange, both vital and flawed, until I realised that maybe the need to be remembered is stronger than the need to remember.