Lost rabbit...

I’m always intrigued by the lost things that you find in the street. It makes me wonder what their back-story may be. Here’s a rabbit that I found today and placed on a wall in case someone should come looking for it. I guess it belonged to a child and fell from their buggy, but was it a girl or a boy and what was its name? Was it an Easter present and who gave it? Has the bunny been missed and is the poor child wracked with despair?

From here my mind as always runs wild, filling in the blanks and answering the questions to build a story which sometimes even I begin to believe. That’s the problem with an overactive imagination and needing to make sense of the world through using it.

The boys name is Tomas, goodness knows what happened to the ‘h’ and why his parents chose to call him that. All his life he will be a Tom, the difference that his parents hoped to make by the odd spelling lost in the truncation of his name. Tomas, as if he wasn’t different enough already.

Tom was two last November and already he’d become the most terrible of terrible twos. At first they thought he would grow out of it, but as each day passes they begin to realise that he won’t. He won’t eat his vegetables and is always screaming for chocolate. He’s one of those children that make people scowl and walk quickly away when they hear him shouting as he makes a scene in the supermarket. Old ladies 'tut', other mothers pull their children away as if Tom has a disease that may infect them.

The rabbit hasn’t got a name. Tom’s grandmother bought it for him at Easter instead of an Easter egg. Tom isn’t allowed chocolate any more, it makes him even worse. His grandmother doesn't call around much any more either, not since Tom started punching her in the legs and slapping her face. The nameless rabbit, which Tom thinks is just another piece of cloth, didn’t fall from the buggy accidentally at all. Tom had flung it as hard as he could when his anger boiled over and his mother, too tired and beaten to notice, wasn’t looking. Tom won’t miss it. He doesn’t even know it has gone. He forgot all about it the moment it hit the tree and fell on to the soil.

Autism can be like that, unforgiving and indifferent. It seems it isn’t just Tom's rabbit that is lost.