I am for the birds. I don’t care if I come back to a house that is empty, if I can step outside and find the sky full. In the hours where I wish to treat myself after I have paid my alms and given my thanks for good fortune - I skulk around websites, wondering if I’ll buy myself a pearl necklace, gold curtains, a pair of green brogues. But what I really want to do is buy myself birds - tens of birds, hundreds of birds. To greedily click on cuckoo, and sparrow, and finch, and thrush - to have a box arrive, by hatted courier, and to cut the knotted strings, and watch a cloud of them rise up, bursting, and fill my garden with the rightful things of a garden: feather and song; the crack of a snail on the stone; broken eggshell; the hymning of rain and sun. But my garden is empty. I am Gatsby, alone, melancholy - playing birdsong on my laptop, by birds that died a long, long time ago.