Shame

The rabbit learns shame late.
Always after the moment has already passed.

In the moment itself there is no shame.
Only something happening too quickly to be shaped.
Words leaving before they are finished.
A movement that does not land where it was sent.
Something slipping out of step with what the rabbit meant.

Shame waits until the room goes quiet.
Until there is nothing left to do but remember.

It does not arrive as noise.
It arrives as interpretation.

It tells the rabbit that what happened was not simply something it did.
It was something it revealed.
That for one unguarded second, something inside the rabbit became visible.
And that the visibility is the part that cannot be forgiven.

The rabbit does not argue with this.
It accepts it the way it accepts weather.
Something that arrives on its own terms, and is not asked to explain itself.

So the rabbit replays the moment.
Again and again.
Not to understand it.
To correct it.
To quietly rewrite itself in memory, until the rabbit it remembers is one it could bear to be.

Over time, the rabbit stops believing that others are responding to what happened.
It decides they are responding to what the moment exposed.
Not the words.
The rabbit underneath the words.

So it begins preparing earlier.
It learns to be smaller before smallness is asked for.
It studies how to enter a room without disturbing it.
It rehearses being unremarkable, the way other animals rehearse being seen.

And still, afterwards, shame finds it.
However careful it has been.
However little it gave away.

Always afterwards.

As if it had been waiting.