It was dead. So dead that I almost couldn’t tell what it was. If it was any other color, I wouldn’t have known it was a bunny. Pure white and entirely dismembered, it’s lucky feet lay on the street between its body and I. Its head was off to the right, nearly under the bumper of a parked car, as though it were still trying to run away. I wanted to get closer, to make sure I was actually seeing what I already knew I was seeing in that moment. Hoping I’d be proven wrong, that the loss in front of me was actually something else entirely, I tried to come up with different possibilities for what it could be if it were not, in fact, a bunny. It was a bunny, though, smeared across the road before my feet, and I already knew it. I could smell death as I walked from the gate to my car, and I cried for the both of us. I could see its body in the drivers-side mirror. Three cars drove over the scene in the time that I sat googling the meaning of rabbits, white rabbits, dead rabbits, dead white rabbits, bunnies, etc. Apparently, to see this, means change, moving forward, to slow down and appreciate life. An opportunity to take my feelings of negativity or fear or doubt and bury them in the rabbit hole that has been opened in front of me. How long will that offer stand? How do I let go, bury, rid of these feelings I have yet to fully understand? And if and when I do bury these things, will there be space enough in the rabbit’s hole for the things that I carry with me? Such a burden to take on, such a sacrifice to make, for such a tiny creature, opening its home to so much, opening itself to so much. Where was it going? Who was expecting its company? What task has now been left unfinished? It’s been 45 minutes. I am still in my car. I haven’t known how to drive away.
