The girl who lived

The girl who lived

Like Harry Potter under the stairs, I was ‘the one who lived’. A rainbow baby (a baby born after loss), wrapped in nappies and layers of meaning and expectation. Unlike Harry, I didn’t get a letter from Hogwarts. I got a Netflix password made from my dead brother’s birthday. There were four of them. Four boys who did not make it. My parents carried that grief like a second skin. Loss became part of the family’s familiar, brutal, ritualised rhyth…