Feeling the Room

There were always too many signals.

The Rabbit could not filter the world the way other animals seemed to.
Sand arrived grain by grain.
A room of voices arrived all at once, none of them turned down.
Crowds, music, the weather of a gathering: all of it came in unsorted, and all of it cost something.

For a long time the Rabbit only knew this as a price.

The party it had to recover from.
The space that was more expensive than it looked.

But the antenna that makes the world too loud is also an antenna.

And it is always on.

So the Rabbit walks into a room and feels it before anyone speaks.

It knows when the air has changed.
It hears the fine that is not fine, the small flattening in a voice that the speaker hoped no one would catch.
It feels the animal standing slightly outside the warmth, smiling at the right moments, quietly somewhere else.

The Rabbit notices that one.
It almost always notices that one.

Because it knows the feeling of standing just outside a room you are technically inside.

And so the same sensitivity that empties the Rabbit at a gathering is the thing that turns it, mid-gathering, toward the person who is struggling without a sound.

It goes to them.
Not with a fix.
Just with the simple fact of being noticed by someone who saw.

The Rabbit cannot turn the antenna down.
It has tried. It does not have that dial.

But it has slowly understood that what feels like too much is also a kind of receiving.
It picks up what others miss.
It feels what a room is feeling, often before the room knows.

And yet, for all that, it misses things too.
Sometimes so much arrives at once that the obvious is lost in it —
the plain cue anyone else would have caught, the signal that was never subtle at all.
Not from not caring.
From being flooded: the one clear note drowned under all the rest.

It does not always see more.
It sees differently — catching the faint, and sometimes, in the noise, losing the loud.

The Rabbit cannot choose how much it takes in.

But it can choose what to do with it.

And what it does, again and again, is find the one animal nobody else has reached, and quietly let them know they are not standing outside alone.