The Hare

There is a Hare on the far side of the water.

The Rabbit has never stood in the same field as the Hare. Not once. They have never shared a patch of grass, never sat in the same quiet, never turned at the same time to look at the same thing. The Hare lives across the sea, in a warmer country, and the whole of their friendship has been carried as voices over the distance - which is a strange way to come to love an animal, and the Rabbit loves it anyway.

The Rabbit knew, the first time they spoke, that the Hare was kin.

Not because the Hare said so. Because of how it ran. The Hare's mind moved the way the Rabbit's mind moved - too fast, too far, in too many directions at once, lit up and then suddenly flat. The same wiring. The same engine that the world keeps trying to call a fault. The Rabbit had spent its life around animals who watched it run and did not understand the running. The Hare did not have to be told. The Hare ran the same way.

But the Hare had been running longer.

That was the difference, and it was everything. The Hare was further along the path - the same path, exactly the same one, only walked further. It had already passed the places the Rabbit was still stuck in. It had found ways through that the Rabbit had not yet imagined were there. And so when the Hare spoke, it was never the careful, distant advice of an animal looking down from a safe ledge. It was an animal calling back over its shoulder from a little way ahead on the same dark road. I have been where you are. Keep coming. It opens out.

It was the Hare who told the Rabbit to write.

The Rabbit should say that plainly, because it is true and because the Rabbit forgets it. None of this - none of the setting-down, none of the words other animals have read, none of the strange relief of saying the thing out loud - none of it would exist if the Hare had not said, once, you should write some of this down. The Hare opened a door the Rabbit had walked past its whole life, and the Rabbit walked through, and has not stopped.

The Hare taught the Rabbit about its own breath. How to slow it. How a body that has braced for thirty five years can be talked, gently, into standing down - not all at once, but a little. Small practices. Quiet ones. The Hare offers them the way it offers everything, without insistence, as a thing that might help and might be set down again if it does not.

Some of what the Hare suggests, the Rabbit is not sure about. There are paths the Hare has walked that the Rabbit looks at from the edge and does not yet step onto - stranger medicines, older doors, ways through that the Rabbit is not ready for and may never be. The Hare does not push. It only describes where it has been, honestly, and leaves the Rabbit to choose. That, too, is a kind of respect: to be handed the whole map, including the parts you decline.

What the Rabbit cannot fully explain is what the Hare does to the inside of it.

They do not speak as often now. There was a time they spoke nearly every day, and then life thickened around them both, the way it does, and the talks grew further apart. Animals get busy. The Rabbit understands this and does not hold it against the world. But when they do speak - even now, even rarely - the Hare can move mountains inside the Rabbit. A single conversation, and something that had sat immovable for weeks shifts and lets the light in. The Rabbit walks away changed. It does not know how the Hare does this. It only knows that very few animals can, and the Hare is one of them.

And the Rabbit has never met it in person.

It would like to, one day. It thinks, if they ever did stand in the same field, the Hare would give it a hug - and the Rabbit, who flinches from most kindness, who inspects every warm thing for the hidden cost, thinks it might simply let that one land. It would like to find out. It would like to close the distance once, and stand beside the animal who has been calling back over its shoulder all this time, and say the thing it is easier to write than to speak.

You told me to write.

So here is the writing, and here is you in it.

Thank you, friend, across the water.