Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

by Max Porter

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

deus ex machina,

I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

Before Dad was a man in the last thirty years of his life.

‘She’ll be way back, before you. She’ll be in the golden days of her childhood. Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.’

sizeable chunks of cracking on, then great sink-holes of melancholy.

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

It is everything. It is the fabric

of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

Just be good and listen to birds. Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity. Just be kind and look out for your brother.