Masking

The rabbit wears a mask.

Not one mask.
A different one for every room.

There is the mask for home, and the mask for work, and the mask for the gate at the school where the other parents stand.

The rabbit puts each one on without thinking, the way another animal might reach for a coat by the door.

By now it is not a decision.
It is a reflex.

The mask is not for the comfort of the rabbit.

This is the part the other animals never see.

The mask is for them.

It is built so that the family can be happy. So that the rabbit can sit at the table and seem easy, and unbothered, and present, while underneath the surface is working twice as hard just to hold the shape of ease.

It is built so that the job stays the job. So that the meeting goes the way meetings are supposed to go. So that no one notices the effort it takes to follow, and respond, and stay still, and keep the momentum the rabbit has fought so hard to gather.

It is built for the gate at the school. For the morning drop-off and the afternoon pick-up, where the rabbit smiles and says the right small thing, because the other parents have their own weather, and their own hurry, and are always, always too busy to hold anything more than a passing hello.

So the rabbit gives them the passing hello.
Light. Warm. Effortless-looking.

And no one sees what it costs.

Because that is the whole point of a mask done well.
It hides the cost.

The cost is enormous.

It is the constant background work of watching its own face. Of measuring its own voice. Of catching the thing it was about to say and trading it for the thing it is supposed to say. Of performing a calm it does not feel, an attention it cannot always hold, a steadiness that is assembled, piece by piece, in real time, all day, every day.

By the evening the rabbit is hollowed out.

Not from the day itself.
From the wearing.

And beneath all of it sits the oldest fear of all.

That if the mask ever slipped, if the other animals saw the rabbit as it truly is inside, they would turn away.

So the mask is not only built to keep the job, or the peace, or the passing hello.
It is built to keep the rabbit from being rejected for who it is underneath.

If they only ever meet the mask, then it is the mask they can reject.
Never the rabbit itself.
The real one stays hidden, and so the real one stays safe.

This is the bargain the rabbit struck long ago, without ever quite agreeing to it.
Protection, in exchange for never being known.

And here is the cruelty of it.
The better the mask works, the more alone the rabbit becomes.

Because what the other animals come to know, and love, and rely on, is the mask.

Not the rabbit.

They love the easy one. The capable one. The one who is fine.
And the rabbit, watching them love it, feels further away than ever, because the thing being loved is the very thing built to hide it.

The rabbit does not know how to stop.

It has worn the masks so long it can no longer find the edges of them. It cannot always tell where the mask ends and the rabbit begins. It reaches up to take one off and finds another underneath, and is no longer certain there is a face beneath the last.

But it wants to.

More than almost anything, the rabbit wants to set the masks down. To be in a room, just one room, without holding a shape. To be tired and say it is tired. To be too much and not have to shrink. To be not enough and not have to apologise for it.

To be seen as it actually is, and find that the warmth does not leave.

This is why the rabbit is writing.

These chapters are the rabbit reaching up, slowly, and lifting the mask away.

Not in any one room, where it has never managed it.
But here. On the page. Where it can be honest in a way it has never quite dared to be in person.

The rabbit is writing so that it might, for once, be known.

Not the easy one.
Not the capable one.
Not the one who is fine.

The rabbit.

The real one. The tired one. The one underneath.

It is setting the words down so that someone, somewhere, might read them and see it, and so that the rabbit might finally believe that being seen is not the same as being left.

That a face, once shown, can still be loved.

That it can put the mask down, at last, and not disappear.