Bunny

niNE

The car ride to the park was silent. Melton was following in another car, driving carefully as they made their way, all three of them dressed entirely in black. The auburn-haired one had not worn such formal clothing as the other two, clad instead in dark sweatpants, and a black shirt that advertised something and had been turned inside out. 

 When the auburn-haired one had seen the pink notebook that the younger one was clutching tightly, eyebrows were drawn inquisitively, and the older one had asked, "What are you doing with that old thing?" though no response was given. 

 They arrived at the park. It was a reasonably nice day, with sun and clouds chasing each other around the sky, and wind that picked up at times and blew hair in every direction. Melton and the auburn-haired one were talking quietly, and Melton asked whether the parent had ever seen Bunny in person. 

"No... now that I think of it..." 

 Melton nodded, showing something like a triumphant smirk.

"This is kind of silly, isn't it? Why is she so convinced that Bunny's dead?" the auburn-haired one asked. 

 "This could be a very good thing. Closure," Melton explained. 

 Meanwhile, the younger one was completely lost in thought. 

 Their first meeting had long been lost in time. There was no single explosive moment when their eyes met and they had their first conversation. They sort of drifted into each others' life, slowly, lazily at first, before it became an avalanche and suddenly Bunny was overwhelmed and that was the beginning of the end. 

 But before the end, and after a somewhat murky beginning, there was a no less delightful middle. A quaint, overlooked middle, filled with many little things that, looking back on it, had turned out to be very big things. Like a pink stuffed rabbit. Or a notebook. Or folded notebook paper. A thousand little mementos to be kept of a middle that had no thoughts of an end, a middle that believed itself to be immortal, until it ended and that was that. An end so sudden and painful as that one could never have been imagined while in such a peaceful middle. 

 Many of Bunny's first conversations were about her name, so it was possible their first words to each other went something along the lines of: 

 "Hi! My name is Bunny." 

 "Huh?" 

 People always seemed to object to Bunny's name, so eventually she had a small speech prepared on the topic in case she met new people. As much as people hurt her sensitive feelings, Bunny was guided by her everlasting philanthropy to always be drawn to new people. She wanted to tell them her stories, and in turn learn theirs, collect memories from them. She would listen patiently and shower people with attention, which both made her feel good for giving away love to others, and generally made people return the favor by being kind to her, which fueled her fantasy that the world was a beautiful and sunny place. 

 Her name would crop up in conversation because she often wore clothes, drew pencil sketches, and read books emblazoned all with the same thing: rabbits. In the particular case when they met at school, Bunny had probably been carrying around her favorite pink notebook that had a rabbit head on the front. Then the conversation would've probably gone more like: 

 "I like your notebook." 

 "I like rabbits." 

 "Why?" 

 "Because my name is Bunny." 

 "So, which came first?" 

 "What?" 

 "The nickname, or the love of rabbits?" 

 "It's my name. And, neither. This is like the chicken-egg question. And that question is way too complex for me to begin to answer, so I won't answer yours either. Does it really matter, anyway?"

 "No, I guess it doesn't."

 Inevitably, the other person pushed the question with a: "But that's not your real name, is it?" 

 "It's what people call me. Isn't that real enough?" 

 When she'd known someone a little longer and they eventually brought up the name issue again, she said something a little stranger about her name. She would say that, honestly, she didn't really care what she was called. Names weren't about identity—she didn't think of herself in terms of "Bunny," in terms of any other name, for that matter, to herself, within her thoughts, she was just the one and only "me." She didn't need labels or words to interpret herself. She would always say that she was larger than that.