The Bunny Followed Me Home From School Today.

4

I'd like to think at some point we were all taught that pink is the happy color, black isn't.

Lighter colors are happiness and dark ones aren't.

Some things are just right because someone older said so.

Questioning life is a mistake.

And teenagers are overgrown children whose imaginations work against reality to aggressively tear them apart.Though we assumed, no one said life was going to be easy. (I assumed). Just because you were taught to believe one thing your whole life, it'll always be right.

People can be wrong.

We were all innocent to someone and there comes a definite moment in a life that can take you to a point of no return - where you're just barely hanging on and faced with the struggle of continuing to hold on or letting it all go.

And in the moment, you learn how powerful your mind really is, how deeply disastrous you are without even knowing it. Because holding on means you could fight like hell to survive - you'll be okay. But, the day you decide that letting go is easier, will be the day you perish in that powerful mind of yours, losing the self you had come to know.

It was June, here, the blazing hot sun was out baking the people who dared to walk under it with their skin bare, but, on the contrary that doesn't mean it wasn't pretty. The sky was blue, only strings of clouds allowed to swim the sky, when, all of the sudden, life got tough and I realized even someone like me would have to fight those deadly demons.

If I hadn't met that pink bunny, though, I could have been happy my entire life.

A lot can happen in a year, six months, a few weeks, a day....I was never one who could imagine life changing in a instance, meeting the wrong person at the wrong time could be catastrophic to my being. And just like that, that familiar life you became so comfortable with burned under that bright, hot sun.

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"There's no bunny following you..." Reese assured me, rubbing my back, gently as I hovered over the car still trying to catch my breathe. It took me awhile to gather my thoughts to understand what Reese had just said.

"It was here. The same bunny from the party, Reese!" I said shaking my head up and down frantically, like by me saying 'yes' made it true.

I jumped into the front seat of the car, suddenly, trying to start the ignition, never once stopping to realize that we were out of gas and I was the one who was responsible to get gas for the car.

In that day of many loses I didn't think I would lose something so valuable, something I felt like I needed if I was to hang on to this thing called life. No one person wants to admit this, it was hard for this overgrown child to admit this, for sure. But, among other things I'd lost earlier that day, I'd add to that list - my sanity.

I was losing it.

It was gone.

I watched it disappear down the sidewalk. My sanity left with that pink bunny Reese didn't see. No one seemed to see.

Down the sidewalk, up the street, and around the corner. Gone.

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The next day I didn't believe school was appropriate for me. I sat in my room, lights off. Dark.

Thoughts in the dark felt the clearest to me. When there's light, there's distraction so you can't focus on that one specific thing you wanna think about, instead your concentrating on how bright the light bulb is, or how dim and how it doesn't brighten your room. Why the chair isn't pushed under the desk? Why are there clothes thrown across my floor? All those little things that seem so important when there's light, but suddenly not until the lights come back on.

Darkness, contrary to beliefs (mostly by adults), is clarity.

Wondering, how in the hell a 6ft tall, pink, Easter themed bunny can walk the streets of Boca Rogue and no one stops to take pictures, honks horns, or simply acknowledge his being.

My bed started to shake as I got deeper in thought, my leg shaking fiercely to the nonsense.

"No!" I whisper-hollered to myself.

"Maybe Reese didn't see him because he was around the corner by then!"

"NO!" I shouted again at my conscience. Because I saw him walk away, right in front of my broke down car and pedestrians were there. Reese was there. He was there. I saw him.

Every detail of the bunny played in my mind like scenes from HTGAWM, nothing was coherent. I saw the end before the beginning, everything but the why. Nothing was in color, I stood in the view of my window watching as the sun continued to rise from behind the big oak trees that stood firmly in front of our house. The sky was purple, today was a pretty day.

I breathed deep and contemplated whether or not to let it out but slowly the breathe started to ease out of my nose and eventually my mouth. I was breathing again and I couldn't tell if I was happy or disappointed kind of like when I was ten and my mom would bring home a new guy every night to keep her company until the sun came up. On one hand, I was content that she had someone to make her laugh, and smile, and have fun but on the other, I was disappointed that that person wasn't me. Breathing was kind of like that.

Happy.
Disappointed.
Happy......disappointed.

In that moment, I found this undeniable urge to call Jo. I fished for my phone in my scattered Winnie the Pooh sheets and dialed Jo's number. It was a absorbing sensation because I both knew that Jo probably didn't have the same number anymore but I still proceeded in calling - I needed my sister to talk to about these problems. Maybe she could help.

I realized this was all a waste of time. Jo Jones, my big sister. My sister. The one who looked like me. The one who use to eat Fruity Pebbles with me while watching The Magic School Bus had abandoned me, alone I was in this house with my scattered thoughts that always seemed to rest back in one place these days.

My dirty converses sat, hidden, in the corner of my room piles of dirty clothes stacked on top of one another making it hard to see them. I trudged over and pulled them onto my feet and drifted out of my room, down the staircase and out of the house.