Before you decide to become a bunny person, know that you will have your heart broken, on average, every five or six years (every two to three if you have more than one bunny). A hard-core rabbit person accepts this, opens her heart, and loves anyway.

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Rabbits, too, are serious about loving. Unlike humans, they only know one way to do it: unconditionally, with every fiber of their lovely little beings. Wholly, completely.

And, of course, for keeps.

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When a rabbit loves, she loves for life—whether the objet d’amour be a human, another rabbit, or even a dog, rabbits are intensely, sometimes aggressively, loyal beings. But rabbit love isn’t obvious, especially if you’re not a rabbit: it’s entirely possible you’ll spend most of your pet rabbit’s life wondering whether she really loves you back or not. Part of this is you: you are not fluent in rabbit, and you won’t be, for a good long time. Maybe not ever with your first rabbit, possibly not even with your second—you have a lot to learn. But there’s also this: rabbits aren’t the most easy creatures in the world to read. Sometimes I think this is on purpose. Which is probably why I fell so hard for rabbits. Probably why I’m still in love. Good love, for me, retains a large component of its initial mystery.

How to achieve this during live-in contact with another human without things flying entirely out of control in terms of secret-keeping, and people getting away with All Sorts of $hit? No idea, so I avoid it. Rabbits, however, are walking (hopping, actually), furry, sneaky little packages of mystery. I’ll choose living with a rabbit over a man any day.

When you adopt a rabbit, you say yes to incognita (you will never really know what she’s thinking, though you will get better, with time, at guessing). And to the non-obvious: rabbits are supremely disinterested in games of catch, or fetch. They are uninspired by bouncing little red lights that fly crazily around the room. They will not pursue the little red lights, even if you give repeated and increasingly animated demonstrations. Your pet rabbit will merely watch you, a quizzical tilt to her head. Translation: “What are you doing, you fucking idiot?”

When a rabbit wants to play with you, she’ll let you know, via a quick little flip of the ears, sometimes also the tail. If you are not astute enough to figure out what you’re being invited to do—in essence, to play chase—well, then, your loss.

If you have deciphered the overture correctly, you follow your pet rabbit at a run, as she dashes around the garden (or room, rooms are good too). Sometimes she’ll show off by jumping into the air and doing a sort of jerky little flip known among rabbit people as a “binky”—she has time, she’s telling you, to show off and enjoy herself, because you, inferior human that you are, will never catch her. She’s a tease: she’ll stop, suddenly, a few paces ahead of you, and glance back, making you think she might actually allow you to catch up, enjoying the knowledge that you will never get her unless she wants you to.

She has made a game out of the hunt, and she’s privileging you with an invitation to play. Because she knows you don’t plan to eat her.

Once she’s done showing off, maybe—maybe—she’ll lie still and let you pet her. She might even lick your hand (not too much, though, and not too often, so that you don’t get ideas above your station). She might also let you rub her ears and nose and neck, and if you stop before she’s done enjoying herself, she’ll give a sharp bump to your hand with her head, ‘encouraging’ you to resume.

If, on the other hand, for any one of an infinity of valid reasons, she is displeased with you—maybe you look dumb when you run, or you didn’t rub the left ear correctly, or you were talking on your phone and not giving 100% of your attention to the massage—she will turn her back and hop away. As she does so, she will dismissively show you the bottoms of her back feet: “eff you,” in rabbit.

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When you adopt a rabbit, you say yes to fragility. You open your home, and your heart, to ephemera: your pet rabbit will not live as long as a dog or a cat. She is a delicate creature—your small child could easily break her back without meaning to harm her. Your rabbit cannot breathe through her mouth—and therefore cannot, for instance, pant when she’s hot, which makes her extremely sensitive to heat and humidity. For the same reason, a respiratory infection can be deadly. There is even a respiratory ailment specific to rabbits, the potential for which is born along with every little lagomorphic being, coded into her DNA from the most ancient of days (rabbits have been around almost as long as the world has been the world). Summers are unkind to bunnies—all of my rabbits have died during that lush, beautiful season that they love so much. A stretch of hot, humid days can bring latent pastorela roaring to life in lungs and trachea, thus ending your rabbit’s already-brief sojourn on this green planet of ours. So too even the most fleeting of contacts with wild bunny droppings (you’d want to check them out, too, if you were a rabbit, like speculating about space aliens that look and act, for the most part, just like us). There are antibiotics, but they only postpone the inevitable: once pastorela has taken a liking to your beautiful rabbit, it won’t want to let her go.

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Your rabbit can also die of a broken heart. Once she’s decided she loves you (never, it’s understood, as much as you are expected to love her), if you leave her—like the fabled lovers of the ancient Arabian desert, whose acquaintance we’ve had cause to make here on this blog of Bad, Bad Love—she might not recover. Ever.

Same goes for bunny beloveds, only more so.

Petal died of a horrible affliction known as fly strike, which I won’t define here because it is so disturbing (you are free to Google and educate yourself if you choose, and you do so forewarned). As the term suggests, fly strike—similarly to the respiratory ailments endemic to the rabbit population—happens quickly, with the onset and full-blown phases sometimes following one another in the space of a few hours. Though any rabbit evincing symptoms of anything that even resembles fly strike should be rushed to a vet (as Petal was), by the time the symptoms are apparent, it’s often too late.

The official diagnosis was fly strike, but I offer to you, friends and faithful readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, the following hypothesis: Petal died of the secondary effects of a broken heart.

Let me explain.

Petal came to live with me as a tiny baby, rescued from a very bad situation involving hunting dogs, a kid with nothing to do and easy access to his father’s collection of guns, and two other very young rabbits who didn’t make it. When she arrived, she was an official mess—not yet neutered, terrified of her own shadow, underfed. Palmer, my male rabbit companion at the time, welcomed her immediately—I had no idea that bunny bonding was even a thing that was supposed to be hard, I just put them together and they fell in love. He was really the one who litterbox trained her—here, not here, okay?—and for a little less than two years they lived in bliss.

When Palmer died—complications from an injury received in a freak accident; where rabbits are concerned, these things happen with mind-bending suddenness and speed—she was distraught. The sight of her, once she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to stand up, laying her head on his in a defeated, heartbroken adieu, will remain with me always.

In the days following Palmer’s death, Petal refused to eat. She wanted to be held, and she wanted to bite me (not deeply enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt—I was responsible for everything else in her little life, so I must be responsible for this too), and she wanted both things at once, but she did not want to eat.

I believe, in my heart, that she wanted to die.

Rabbits’ digestive systems are wonders of delicate balance: rabbits digest everything twice, thus (efficiently!) deriving full nutritional value from their food. In order to produce the hard, inoffensive little balls we all recognize (products of the second round), they must first ingest a substance of their own production known as ‘night feces’. At night, if you see a rabbit cleaning her nether regions, she’s likely taking care of this bit of business as well.

During those three days without food—if she hadn’t broken her fast, upon the arrival of Sarge, which did spur her to eat, though new love was not instantaneous, far from it, she certainly would have died—something went off with Petal’s microbial balance, and she never quite recovered. She had digestive difficulties throughout the rest of her too-short life (one of them being that she only incompletely ingested her night feces), and the conditions resulting from those difficulties—too much moisture from frequent (and loving but unwelcome) butt-baths administered by Yours Truly—set up the perfect storm for fly strike.

I firmly believe that love-sickness over the loss of her first love—she was every bit as noble a lover as Isolde or Blanchefleur, every bit as faithful as Majnun’s Leyla—occasioned her premature abandonment of her second.

A crucial factor in the decision to put her to sleep (rather than put her through the painful and protracted process of cure and recovery) was, in a way, also the fault of love (the good kind, the best): the almost certain necessity of separating her from Sarge, for a period of several months, perhaps permanently. The fly strike had resulted in the loss of most of the fur from the lower half of Petal’s body (astonishing that any illness could produce such ravages overnight…), and had likewise produced peeling, burning sores in the exposed skin. Sarge would have tried his hardest to help her heal by licking the affected area—rabbits, once they’ve found their mates, are assiduous, incessant and mutual groomers. Which would have made the problem infinitely, infinitely worse.

Separating bonded rabbits is not an option. Their hearts would never stand it.

So Petal went to sleep instead.

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Rabbits and I were an accident. I didn’t have a rabbit as a child, none of my grade-school classes had them. My father told stories of raising rabbits in hutches in the back of his preacher-daddy’s house in rural Tennessee. One female—or doe, as I would learn, much later, to call them—was especially forthright in demanding attention when he went out to feed them and clean their cages. For my father, raising rabbits was like having a paper route—he bred them (or they probably bred themselves) and then he sold the offspring, and the adults too, once they got too old to breed. I don’t think he sold them as pets. Which, though he never said so, maybe bothered him (he was a hunter, but that was different): we never ate rabbit in our house.

My first bunny, Tamerlane, was a peace offering after a weeks-long fight with my then-boyfriend, eventual second husband, and now ex (I was a bit of a slow learner in that relationship). I lived in Princeton during the week, at the Institute for Advanced Study, and spent weekends with him in his loft, west of Broadway, between Canal and the financial district. I decided that we should adopt a shelter dog (his loft was a fifth-floor walk-up, but that didn’t seem like a deal-breaker to me). In fact, I was insistent that we should adopt a shelter dog. Adamant. I’d talked to a shelter, they had pit-bull mixes that no one wanted. One of those dogs was for me.  I bought a leash and a bowl, and chose a name: Persephone. I made an appointment with the shelter. I was excited (possibly more by the prospect of a dog than by the future ex, even in those relatively early days of our union—question: why don’t we ever listen to ourselves? Our selves are pretty smart…).

The night before the appointment, future ex brought down the hatchet on my plan. Fifth-floor walk-up, dog couldn’t come to Princeton with me during the week, mess, responsibility, time. All of which, to be fair, were valid points. But he had no idea what he’d unleashed (sorry).

Ours was a relationship with a whole lot of problems, some still latent at that point but I knew they were there. I was, I suppose, planning to fix them with a dog (not, you will note, a child: I know myself way better than to try to fix anything with one of those).

I knew very well without calling the shelter to ask (I couldn’t bear to) what had happened to Persephone and her litter-mates, which didn’t help with the relationship problems—when I’d had too much to drink (which was practically every night we spent together, thankfully weekends-only), I’d accuse him of condemning Persephone to the needle. Which wasn’t entirely fair, but wasn’t entirely off-base either. All this happened right after New Year’s.

You are probably thinking—and you are correct—that much valuable information concerning future-ex/Husband #2’s capacities for empathy was waved in front of me like a huge red flag throughout the Saga of Persephone. And so you, dear and faithful reader of this Bad, Bad Love blog, are likely wondering whether any of this vital information was heeded. And I can report to you, without fear of misrepresenting the facts, that, though this information most definitely registered (you can’t not register the fact that your quasi-live-in significant other has just condemned a shelter dog to the needle), it was not, at least not until much later, heeded. I repeat: I’m a slow learner.

And a slow forgiver, particularly of grave offenses against animalkind: future ex was still trying to appease me on Valentine’s day.

To which end, he made a date with me at an address in Chinatown that I figured was some restaurant he’d discovered, probably cheap. Instead, it was a pet shop, tiny, and filled mostly with raucous birds.

Future ex’s idea: guinea pig. Wut? Like I say, vital information, huge red flags…

Mine: the adorable bunny in the window, engrossed in grooming his long lop ears—I’d never seen a lop before, and I was instantly smitten. The bunny, I announced, was coming home with me, and future ex could do as he pleased (more than a little bravado on my part: the loft was his and I didn’t have keys…signs, signs, everywhere…).

Pet-Shop Lady Linda—who was a little deaf, because of the screeching birds, so she talked in shouts—removed the rabbit from his grass-filled fish tank and put him in my arms. He immediately nestled into my shoulder and began a chittery bunny-purr.

Linda, loudly: “Hasn’t done that with anyone! Looks like love!”

I had zero idea about how to care for a rabbit—I am desperately ashamed to admit that he rode home with me for the first time on my lap in a cardboard box with holes punched into it, like a very big hamster—but I immediately set about learning.

Linda was right: I was head over heels in love.

And not with future ex.

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Who had, on that frigid night and unbeknownst to him (he would later evince symptoms of extreme jealousy toward the bunny, and guess how much I cared), introduced me to the love of my life.

Rabbit.

Different rabbits, a succession of them—they can’t stay on earth long, so I must love all rabbits. Love all rabbits as rabbits themselves love, once they decide to: unconditionally and fiercely.

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Petal’s first love Palmer came to me as he was dying (there’s a blog post about that, from way back sometime in November, if you’d like to read it). And now he visits me all the time. He comes, as Wallace Stevens says, “at the end of the day…[w]hen the shapeless shadow covers the sun, and nothing is left except light on…fur…in the grass, in the peacefullest time,” when “the light is a rabbit-light.” I hope that Petal will join him.

The rabbit won’t look like her—Palmer exactly resembled the brown cotton-tails most people don’t want in their gardens, but Petal, with her chocolate-colored fur and dainty white boots, her white, flower-petal nose, will have to find some subtle, ingenious, maybe even sneaky little way to let me know it’s her.

I’ll be watching, with all my heart.

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Thank you, friends and readers (many are both), for bearing with this change in program. I needed to do this, and I so appreciate your reading. I know you are rabid to hear about Husband #1’s disappearing acts and their exotic origins, and you shall, you shall. Two weeks from this Friday, to be exact, so please don’t go anywhere. Or if you do, please come back.

And next week, a surprise is in store—something from my novel in progress, well into its fifth draft now, which is all about Bad, Bad Love, in this world and on into the next. I’ll be in London most of next week, staying in the hotel—finally!—in which Patron Saint of Cheaters is set. There will be Instagram posts all week long, from London (and from the hotel!), leading up to a novel chapter in which the love is especially bad. Served up on Friday night, late and hot and terrible, just the way I know you like it.

I hope to meet you next with a heart that, if not lighter, at least is closer to being at peace with Petal’s loss. Right about now, I’ll just be honest, it’s a tough, tough pill to swallow. I cry a lot, and carry around soiled Kleenex, and don’t give a fuck who sees me or what they think (as any medieval theorist will tell you, these are symptoms of lovesickness, which can be fatal, though I hope not, or at least not yet, for me). In shah allah I’ll still be walking this earth this time next week—till then, friends.

By the way… mistreated or abandoned rabbits don’t get nearly the amount of press that dogs and cats do, but they’re out there, and they need help. If you’d like to make a donation, or sponsor a bun currently being fostered, or maybe even foster a bun yourself, please visit http://www.therabbitresource.org/