Sweetpea

Sweetpea was the color of an Arizona thunderstorm, cumulus clouds of fur curling and shaking over a desert-flowered shirt. He held her close, a small smile perched on his lips, stubble sprouting from above and below the threads of his voice whispering to her. The bus filled with tourists and teenagers as we rolled down the hill of Queen Anne. Most passengers stopped to stare briefly at Sweetpea, at the man with a bunny on his chest, at the cage balanced precariously on a duffel bag on top of a plastic seat. He’d said yes to the picture that two women had asked to take of the furry heartbeat of a creature, all fluff and ears filling the frame. After the photo was clicked, he held Sweetpea out across the aisle. “You can hold her if you’d like. She loves people,” he said. The woman reached out and cradled the bunny in two hands, little gray paws trembling between palms. The bus bumped over asphalt. The woman held on more tightly. The man said, “She can feel your tension. If you sit back in the seat she’ll relax.” The woman did as she was told, settled into the subtly cupped backrest and exhaled. “You’re right!” she beamed, the small bundle against her shoulder like a baby. “How old is she?” she asked.

“She’s eight. She was abused. They killed her boyfriend, hit him on the head, threw him around. Both of them. These types of animals, people see them as disposable. They aren’t respected. So I make up for all that and love her up for the rest of her life. And all she wants to do is love. See, she likes you.”

After a few minutes the woman peeled Sweetpea from her chest and handed her back across the aisle. The younger woman asked, “Do you leave her at home alone?”

Sweetpea stayed still and silent back in the man’s arms as he tumbled his story into the aisle.
A cancer diagnosis in April. Lymphoma. An unexpected three days in the hospital without Sweetpea while chemicals swam in his body. Sadness and longing and obligation. Her inability to leave his side when he got home. “She holds it for six hours” he said, “if I fall asleep with her in my arms. I have to put her on the ground so she’ll go to her litter box, she won’t leave the bed. I have weekly treatments but I’m only gone for eight hours. But I’ll make it. I need to stay alive for her.”

He hadn’t heard when the older woman said at the same time, “Sweetpea’s there to take care of you.”

My back ached with emotions. I didn’t need to turn around to feel the tears in his eyes. Or hers. Or were those mine? Everything blurred. He was talking about his pet but he was talking about himself. The need for love and respect and a place to call home. To be healed. To be held and needed and missed. I thought of how we turn to animals for affection and give them love we cannot show to those of the human sort, to those who may hurt us. And by hurt us I do not mean throw us around like Sweetpea’s boyfriend. I mean leave us, lie to us, love someone else, change their minds, die. Just die. Bunnies can live for 16 years, he said. But they go, too. I wondered what this animal thought; was this affection unconditional love or simply a befuddlement about where all the other bunnies had gone and this warm human in the night would have to do? Either way, they helped one another. Acceptance, respect, easing of loneliness. That was their love. So be it.

The man was telling a story of his life to those that would listen, a small rabbit hole of words and images that ended with a dark nest in a crumbling apartment: a man with cancer in his veins and a silent bunny on his chest. Or was the image a sunlit meadow with a luminescent cloud of fur against of fuzzy, smiling cheek?

The bus jerked to a stop. Our stop.

He wasn’t talking to us but I heard him anyway. “Thanks for giving your attention. All Sweetpea can do is love. She is pure love.”

And we got off the bus.