blackandwhite....whiteandblack



I never knew if I believed in soul-mates, or love at first sight, but I had a black bunny. He was not planned or sought-out, he simply happened. A single picture told me I needed him in my life, or perhaps more accurately, that he was already in my life, although I hadn’t met him yet. It was 8pm, I was not prepared to bring home something new into my life, but he wasn’t new, he was already apart of it. It was the easiest decision I ever made, and it was not a decision at all. His name, his place in my heart, was already there within me.



When he needed someone else in his life I knew as well, dragging my mother to place after place on her birthday to find a companion. And after a whole day of seeing rabbits in horrible conditions, having given up and decided it wasn’t meant to be, in the last stop of the day, disheartened and exhausted I turned to see her. And once again there was no decision. While he was black with long floppy ears, she was glowing white, but not completely. She held juxtaposition within her black ears, the one black splot on her back, and the striking black eyeliner that she starred at me behind. Where he was calm she was confident. They completed each other, the black and white converging into a unity and a complete separation at the same time. After introducing them into my life, I’ve never been able to think of black and white the same way again. I considered how my twin brother had always loved animals that contained both (orcas, penguins, zebras…although his favorite changed, they were always black and white). I considered how my first rabbit, from my childhood had shared both colors, split in the straightest line down her back. I consider now how they keep coming back to me, in clothing, dreams, pictures, my two pitbulls that came into my life like a pair of dice. 


When I found a love for black and white film, and found them again even when I had lost them. The negative and the true became a perplexing thought for me. I saw him again, but only in negation, and although he had left me for sometime I was shocked when it was not him on my film. It hurt at first, to think that I could mistake my new bun for him, as if I had replaced him. But then I thought how beautiful it was that he could still come to me and make me wonder what was real. To remind me that juxtaposition and coexistence could be one and the same. That negation created creation, and creation created negation. That neither destroyed the either, but reinforced it, black and white, white and black, the same and completely different. 

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