I bought my bunny ears on a whim. A friend, tall, dark, and handsome by way of visual description, called me out of my room one evening and decided for us that the weather was perfect to go buy trifles at Five Below. Mind you, we had been planning this trip to this store with cheap stuff for weeks. But there had never been an agreeable day for both of us until that day on the weekend. I gave him several reasons why I didn’t feel like making that day the day, but he insisted with playful forcefulness that I needed to get my ass off his bed on whose edge I was sitting and on the evening road so that the perfect weather can serve a function if not for me, then for him at least.

I am glad and not glad that I listened to him.

The evening road walk was truly as pleasant as my friend had described to me (like the suncatcher that he is, he has eyes for trapping moments into colorful rainbow jars). The trifle-shopping was a delight too. I danced to songs covered from The Greatest Showman as I looked through Halloween accessories and nearly bought a puppy cloth for a one-year-old birthday celebrant that I was trying to trick into finding a place for me in her heart before she grew up too much to mind loyalty. I also found my heart lying somewhere among the fanciful posters of anime characters and reproductions of ancient Chinese danqings. I literally was shivering and yoyo-ing in excitement as I went through each poster and projected my infatuated love for well-developed manga characters onto them.

I bought one; the one of Tanjiro and Nezuko huddled together as they wade off invisible snow-bellied enemies with their ferocious gazes. The moment I saw and reflexively gasped at the painting, I saw a realm in front of me – me standing in front of my brother, fiercely guarding against provocations directed at him while he held my shoulders or my neck (because he is taller from behind and cut through the malicious energy blobbing around me in the shape of dollops of black snow with his crystal glass gaze.

My brother is to me what Tanjiro is to Nezuko – both my protector and a fragile trouper over whom I am guardian. We are both getting revenge on Life for nearly giving up on us even when all we wanted to do was live fully. We are succeeding, one fight at a time. I am tired, though. I fear he is too. Muzan is indeed everywhere.

Buying the poster was purposeful, almost destined. But my bunny ears weren’t so much. My Five Below (the friend who had decided to make a pleasant shopping experience out of the weather situation) expertly led me to the ears section because I had specifically told him I needed new ears. He gleamed through the boxes of ears with his eyes and landed his hands on one.

“This should work,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. The box packaging was colorful and pinkishly kawaii enough to grab my attention and stir happy in me. I saw that the ears had bunny flaps standing on them and, for a second, my eyes shifted to the bland black box close by but, soon as I laid my eyes on it, my heartbeat dropped to boring. I was already low on serotonin, anything less than that and I might have to watch my body be an ode to melancholy. I picked up the carbon cube of cuteness containing my bunny ears and dropped it into my cart.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that ears are not meant to be seen and admired; they are meant to be worn. Not worn for oneself. But worn for others to see. To hang a piece of arched ears across your head is like exposing the clit to the air; you can feel the breeze but can’t reach down to touch or see the clit without exactly ruining the experience. I wear an open-to-the-air clit on my head when I wear my bunny ears.

Like the nature of air, people did not immediately catch on my new ears, they simply looked at me like they did everyone else – through hollowed gazes that permeated through thick skins and made origamic paper cranes out of dead wood.

I nearly was getting less self-conscious about the bunniness of my new ears until, one day, a random person on the road stopped me in my tracks and said,

“Oh my God, I like your ears.”

“Oh, thank you,” I replied

“Your ear-phones, headphones I mean,” the random-stranger-on-road added as a clarification.

Like the gusty dispersal of pent-up air, the comment of random-stranger-on-road is followed by a torrent of other comments about the likeability of my ears.

“You can’t tell me otherwise,” some would say, “this is li-te-ra-lly the cutest thing I

have seen all day.””

“Your headphone is so cute. I wish I could get that for my daughter.”

Some would start off with a half-hearted effort to compliment something else first.

“Those pants, they look nice. And your headphones, it looks so… cute.”

It was easy to tell from the rise and fall of their words that they found the ears more appealing than the pants or anything else for that matter. I didn’t know how to feel about these compliments. Not like I know how to feel about any compliment but this, even more so. How should one feel about getting effusive remarks about the one thing that was merely an accessory that could hardly be said to the constitution of their body, the very thing they had merely gotten on a whim?

I always thought to myself when compliment-ers singled out my bunny ears, “You like this new flimsy, thrifty, pinkish, kawaii ears? But what of the rest of me? How could you look at the whole of me and then decide that what you are going to praise with brimming enthusiasm are the damned ears?”

My brooding over the outpouring of compliments I got on my ears wasn’t new to me. For more years than I can remember, I have allowed myself to feel everything my mind and body are constantly absorbing. I have let myself break through the fourth wall of my subconscious and made it come to fore in my thought processes. Good, bad, ugly, messy thoughts, my headspace takes them all in and tries to make sense of them, no filter allowed. What was, however, surprising was that I did more than thinking about the tilted praises, I felt them too. Way too much, in fact. My feeling was not of amusement as was often the case with me, it was one of begrudging envy. I ruminated on the comments and the subtle inferences they contain, made deductions based on them, and sapped a specific feeling out of those deductions.

I excavated feelings that should otherwise have been left buried.

Wearing my bunny ears day in, day out and getting well-meaning compliments that made envious of an object I own has made me realize just how much of a feeling being I was becoming. I was also becoming a person of desire, a person needy of being desired. I have never expected anything of myself and have never thought myself to be below any vice. But, all my life, I have struggled through manifesting the human-quality of sentiency. To suddenly find myself wanting to want praises, and desiring to be desired, it’s too much to handle.

Nothing happens suddenly, I know. Much of what happens to a person is often pre-empted, foreshadowed, signaled, enigmatized with the lax exigency of a set of Morse codes encrypted in a Shashibo cube. When did I start feeling too much of the world? What pre-emptive signs did I miss?

Is it weird that I am thinking about these questions while wearing my bunny ears and a contemplative face that does not reveal half of the effect the love songs that I am listening to has on me?