LaraShari

Someone brought carrots to my rabbit shrine yesterday morning. He must have eaten them because they weren’t there when I came back in the evening. Logical conclusion I think.

There was also a sculptural response to Blacky, about ten feet away, in the form of a giant turtle. The plaque, unfortunately, was unreadable.

I appreciate the narrative reference.

In my seventh summer my parents and I forgot my rabbit outside in a plastic dog hutch. It died of heat exhaustion.

“Eew”.

“That’s so sad”.

“Is there a rabbit buried here”?

The memorial for my dead rabbit is on view in Washington Square Park until the final hour of melting. It is for every forgotten love represented in the rabbit deaths of the Brodsky-Hollis household; for the memory of Blacky, black from ear to toe, for my mother’s rabbit, death by crazy eye infection, my second rabbit, death by skin infection, and for my brother’s rabbit, eaten alive by rats.

When I was young I wanted to be older for the experience of a great writer. My family was the landscape, beams in a house I never saw because I lived inside of it, and the wild garden behind it. Pain to call pain was chestnut spines in your feet walking barefoot in the spring, and cuts from reaching too deep into a raspberry bush.

Swimming with seals in the Galapagos was common place, bathing in a jungle river was ooky though warm, and the only blow dart I ever aimed at a butterfly awakened a disgust for violence.

Healing was meant to be done alone, and the best playmate is always yourself, seeking truth in a blade of grass.

I retreated from my snowman building companions into a vortex without moving, sucked into the need for realization and beauty. I disappeared cubby hole style into the lonely shelter of art, my real home, the one I saw in myself in being; Inescapeable, Indeterminate, Infinite.

earlier today I was all for the abolition of valentines day, but then with these mittens and a little more thought, my heart swayed. It is, after all, the only holiday I know of that promotes symbolic cannibalism, aztec style.