Could I Make a Rabbit Love Me With Telepathy?

Lola is my housemate’s rabbit, and we’ve been cohabiting for a couple of months now. But it’s safe to say we haven't exactly bonded. Mainly because she’s a terrible housemate: she doesn’t like being picked up, she runs away from me when I try to feed her bananas, and she digs. She digs endless, unexpected, injury-inducing holes that I fear are her way of dodging my attempts at friendship.

The thing is, I really love all creatures, and I really want Lola to like me. I want her to be happy, but also (more importantly) I want to stay housed. It is devastatingly hard for 20-somethings with casual jobs to find places to live in this city, so now that I’ve finally got a house, I am determined to remain in it. Which means finding common ground with an elusive, seemingly ambivalent animal.

Which is why I hired the esteemed Caroline Pope, Melbourne animal communicator and pet psychic, and charged her with helping me connect with Lola. This was my final shot at understanding Lola; at determining what kind of housemate and friend she'd like me to be.

So, one Thursday evening, Caroline showed up at my house in a huge black Range Rover like a Kardashian. She complimented my house and smacked her frosted-coloured lips. “Very nice,” she said. We made our way to the makeshift seance scene I had prepped, and Caroline sat down next to the flowers I’d stolen from my neighbours’ garden. Then she told me to start off the telepathic session, so I jumped right in with a joke I fleeced from Google:

“Lola, what do you get when you pour hot water down a rabbit hole?”

Lola sat by the wall, indifferent. Like she was just an animal.

Lola, through Caroline's mouth, answered: “A drowned rabbit.”

I was absolutely gobsmacked. “It’s actually a hot cross bunny,” I said.

“A dead rabbit is the only rabbit,” Lola hit back.

This wasn’t going well. Lola couldn’t even throw me a pity laugh. “I feel like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” I said, but before I could finish, Lola admitted she was intimidated by me. And that I’m always in her personal space.

I’ve had ex-best friends and boyfriends tell me I can call or text too much, but now I was getting it from a pet. "Maybe you're just shy," I said. “I’m not shy,” she replied. “I don’t discriminate on feeling emotions.” Like a bitter ex, I was stubborn. “You’re non-discriminative in the way you don’t give anyone anything. You never let me play with you.”

I was acting like a real brute, I knew it. But then Lola became the bigger person and offered me some profound spirituality. “What I’m prepared to give everyone is nothing except time,” Lola said, looking at the wall. “I give my energy to you.”

It was encouraging. “Sometimes you come up to me and let me pat you, and it’s brief, but it’s very beautiful because it’s so brief,” I said, opening up, letting my own walls down, letting her into my heart’s hutch. And if Lola’s reply doesn’t make you weep, you will never know what love is. “That’s all I want,” she said, still gazing at the wall. “I just need an energetic love, not a physical one.”

I didn’t need the eye-contact from her. I just needed to hear those words. “Let’s talk about the digging,” I said. “Are you trying to run away from me, or is it an existential thing?” Because, what if she was a nihilist?

But no, just like everyone else, Lola is prone to stress. With her white, bread loaf-like back turned away from me, she said: “I don’t know if an eagle is going to swoop in and snatch me up. There are so many people walking around this space.”

“Lola, I get it. I don’t like people in my space either,” I said. It seemed Lola and I had finally found common ground — I had cracked the rabbit!

I also thought that was the end of the session, because what more could you want. But I was wrong; Caroline wanted to scan Lola next. “She’s got some sort of hormonal imbalance,” she said. "But don’t worry, I can check her with the NES machine.”

NES stands for BioEnergetiX WellNES System, and is run by a company called NES Health. According to its website, “[NES is] the world’s first practical clinical system for ‘reading’ the Body-Field and then correcting it.” Caroline explained that the NES machine, which looks like the remote control for a split system air conditioner, picks up the physical energies that swirl around our bodies, charging them up. “It saved both my animals,” she said. For the whole psychic session, Lola had been curled up against the wall defensively. But when Caroline pointed the NES machine at her, she actually stretched out her little legs. And then she turned around. “You either have to burrow or you’re dead," Lola said, through Caroline. "They’re the only two options.”

In that moment, surrounded by wilted stolen flowers and Caroline Pope and a rabbit, it hit me: Lola was right. You can either get neck-deep in loss, achievement, moving, love and life, or you can just exist on the surface. In other words — be they Lola's or Caroline's, who really cares at this point — being alive is about committing to the dig.