Happiness Is Contagious

The Rabbit has started to notice something it did not used to notice. When it carries happiness, the happiness moves. It does not stay in the Rabbit's chest. It crosses over, into the Otter, into the little ones, into whoever happens to be in the room. The warmth spreads out and lands somewhere else, and the somewhere else warms too. Such as a day that is today: nothing special marked on it, no occasion, just an ordinary morning the Rabbit woke up carrying, and by now it is in everyone.

The direction of it is new. For a long time the Rabbit did the opposite. It took the warmth out of a room rather than put it in. It carried something heavy and the heaviness leaked, and it could feel the others adjusting around it, going quieter, going careful, sucking themselves smaller to make space for whatever the Rabbit had brought through the door. Even when the Rabbit tried to mask it. Even when it pretended the weather was fine. The pretending never stopped the leak; it only hid where the leak was coming from.

So the Rabbit knows the cost of the other way, which is part of why this matters.

There is something like a mission in it now. To be happy for the others. Truly happy, not the performed kind, not the mask arranging a smile over a flat sky, but the real thing, and to let it show in the voice and the small movements and in everything the Rabbit does. And here is the part that keeps surprising it: the happiness comes back. Tenfold. The Rabbit gives a little warmth and the room hands back more than it was given, and the giving and the getting fold into each other until the Rabbit cannot tell which one started it.

It is intoxicating. The Rabbit will say that plainly, because it is true.

The Rabbit hopes it lasts. It also knows it will not last every day. There will be days the weather closes back in, days the warmth is simply not there to hand over, and that is allowed. The Rabbit is not ordering itself to be happy. It is only trying, doing the best it can with the day it is handed. On a day like today, that is more than enough.