The mechanism of a lock turning makes a definitive, finite sound, and Bunny listens for the final reckoning of the tumbler as it falls into place. When she hears the elevator doors as they open and close, sounds less vivid but still audible, Bunny sits up, and pivots so that her feet are on the floor. Something under her skin, but deeper near to bone, throbs like an infection, pulsates the way a heart beats, something that cannot be quieted or contained, but it can, and does, expand. Bunny grabs her pillow, hugs it, squeezing the life out of it, and this, whatever it is that feels like love but is not love, definitely not love, pushes from the inside to get out.
The impact of a plate or a book, when hurled across a room, is declarative, but the pillow proves to be a disappointment similar to the disappointment of a hurricane that changes course and blows out to sea.
Because there are some thoughts, certain kinds of thoughts, that need to be said aloud, Bunny needs to articulate the words to make them tangible and undeniable. Even if no one is listening, the words are there, like a pet rock on your night table, just there, doing nothing, but over time stone does turn to sand, and out loud Bunny says, to no one, not even Jeffrey, “I do not want to be in this world.”
To see her when she stands up is to know that the grimy white T-shirt reaches just below her hipbone. Her black panties sag at her butt. Not that she cares, although she does remember her mother’s admonition about the importance of clean underwear because what if you got hit by a car.
“I’m pretty sure if I were hit by a car,” Bunny had said, “I wouldn’t be thinking about my underwear. I’d be thinking about other things. Like am I going to lose a leg.”
No one need be concerned that Bunny will be wearing dirty panties when she walks in front of a bus because she would never walk in front of a bus, just as she’d never jump from a window or a cliff. Bunny believes, she has always believed, that life, all life, is sacred. You don’t just snuff out a life on a whim. She is a person who apologizes when she kills a bug, despite being well aware of the fat lot of good her apology does for the spider whose guts are squashed on the kitchen wall.
Bunny does not want to kill herself. She does not want to die. It’s that she no longer wants to live. To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. Bunny would prefer to die of natural causes, but she’s not sure she can wait it out.
Imagine it this way: imagine being on the twelfth floor of a burning building and your options are to be consumed by the fire or jump from the window to a certain death. Can you cling to the hope of being rescued, saved from being burned to a crisp by two brave firemen? Can you bear the intense heat for just a little bit longer? But to feel the heat of the fire, to hear the snap and pop of the flames, to be overcome by the smoke, to be unable to breathe, to imagine melting like wax, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West, and then comes the moment when you know that no one is going to rescue you; when you know that you will either die by fire or jump from the window and die by falling. Neither choice is a good one, but still, you’ll have to decide which way you are going to die, which will hurt most.