I did not plan to write this book.
Just over three months ago, my soulmate, Mat, died suddenly and inexplicably. One moment he was part of the ordinary rhythm of my life, and the next he was gone. Without a hint or warning.
Anyone who has experienced that kind of immediate loss knows the strange landscape of grief that follows. Time behaves really oddly. Days blur into one another. Your mind tries to make sense of something that refuses to feel real.
Two weeks after his death, I began writing Swift.
The book flew from me in a torrent, in that raw, immediate aftermath when everything still feels unreal and painfully vivid at the same time.
I did not approach it as a project so much as a necessity.
Writing became a way of breathing.
I wrote for 14-18 hours a day. The words burst from me like a massive download, in long, intense, timeless sessions. I edited later.
I wrote to stay alive.
The title comes from the tiny baby swift I rescued just before Mat died. He told me everything about it. He helped me get it onto the right diet of insects. Then he died. And I was left holding the bird.
As I held its beating heart in one hand and Mat’s ashes in the other, I decided that the swift was the carrier of my soulmate’s tortured soul, and unless the bird fledged in time, Mat’s soul would be forever trapped in “The Between”.
The stories we tell ourselves are everything.
Swifts are remarkable birds that spend most of their lives in flight, travelling for up to two years on the wing across vast distances. Eating. Sleeping. And mating. All while in the sky.
In retrospect, what surprised me most while writing was how creative expression can exist alongside profound grief. People often imagine grief as something paralysing, but it can also be strangely energising and clarifying. Writing Swift gave me a carrier for my intense pain. It allowed me to hold the love, the shock, the never-ending questions and the memories all in one place.
The book shaped itself into a narrative that helped me understand what had happened, even if the deeper mystery still remains. It is also bloody funny at times. Grief has a way of allowing both tears and humour to coexist. In fact, some of the most unexpected moments in writing the book were those flashes of absurdity, like playing charades with the guy in the morgue.
Technically, the process was fast and intense. The entire print-ready manuscript was completed in just six weeks.
Ultimately, Swift is not only about loss. It’s about love, how the soul contracts — and the strange intelligence that grief sometimes gives you. It’s about transformation and the resilience of the human heart. Writing this book was my way of letting the paradox of love and pain take flight.
Swift is published by Melinda Ferguson Books
