March 2020: Rabbit Rabbit
In our very early twenties there was a time that M. and I both lived in Spain. I was doing a semester abroad in Madrid. She had dropped out of college for a year to live in Barcelona. We were young enough that you could go on these sorts of adventures. I took an 8 hour bus from Madrid to Barcelona, where M. waited to meet me very early in the morning at the bus depot at the edge of the city. We had made it to this other part of the world and still had one another. M. rented a tiny room in an apartment with three other strangers - a British art student, a Greek musician, a Scottish woman studying anthropology. Their apartment was right by the Picasso museum in a neighborhood dotted with tourists. We used to smoke on their rooftop and peek down at the small street below where you could always witness one or two pick pockets at work.
While living in Spain M. got into a relationship with an older woman who spoke little English, but what’s important is that this woman once got M. a gift and that gift was a pet rabbit. I was back in New York by the time this happened, composing emails to M. from my chunky Dell laptop on the nightstand I used as a desk. What’s the rabbit’s name? I asked. M. would write back about driving to Valencia for a weekend or looking for a new apartment but didn’t mention the rabbit’s name. Months later, when she’d broken up with the Spanish woman and returned back to New York, renting a studio apartment across the street from where I lived, she mentioned one day that she was sad because she’d heard that Courtney was sick.
Who? I asked.
M. pinked. Oh, she said. My rabbit. We named her Courtney.
I laughed, a laugh for the stories you can’t make up. What could’ve been weird I just found flattering.
M. was the first friend I’d made in New York. Last weekend, almost 19 years after we first me, I went to her apartment and helped as she stood on a ladder to get down four boxes of photographs from the time when we were young. M. took her camera with her everywhere and we always joked that she had all the photos and I had all the stories. And so we sat for hours pouring through them for a collaboration about our youth. The photos were their own time capsule - there were girls in bars and names that came back to us in a rush, parties that went sour, or bright faced joy for days we couldn’t fully remember. What would it mean to create an archive of this time? To try and communicate to our younger selves - baby faced, full of idealism and wonder - what the future would bring? Did they know or care about the future? Could they have imagined any of this?
I hadn’t been to M.’s apartment in years but I still knew to go into the bedroom, get down on my hands and knees and greet Tori, her white and black rabbit that favored hiding under the bed and twitching her beautiful nose. Hi Tori, I said. She hopped to the other side of the room to hide under the couch. There is a superstition that if you say rabbit rabbit on the first of the month that gifts will come to you by the months end. There is also a superstition that sailors would not say the word rabbit when at sea because it would bring bad luck. It is hard to read the news and take in the panic of the world without wanting something to clutch at - superstitions, old friends, photographs of my own youth in a city I love. When we were young we so often thought: why not us? for questions of falling in love and making art and rushing headlong into the world. Now I often think: why not us? and it is a question of worry, a touchstone if fear as I try to kickstart my own faith. Make art. Kiss friends hello and goodbye. Celebrate the first of a new month. Rabbit rabbit.
xo,
c