The Friends Who Read

The Rabbit leaves its tracks where they can be found.

Small ones. Quiet ones.
A path sent to a friend.
The things it wrote but could not say out loud,
set down in the open
in case someone, one day, steps where it stepped.

Some it leaves for one animal in particular.
A track shaped for a single set of paws,
left where it hopes that one might pass.

Some it leaves only for itself.
Not to be found at all.
Just to get the thing out of its chest and onto the ground,
because carrying it had grown heavier than setting it down.

The writing helps the Rabbit.
That was the first reason, and it would have been reason enough.

It does not leave the tracks expecting to be followed.

The forest is busy.
Every animal in it is carrying something.
They have things to do and places to be.
Each has its own burrow, its own winter to get through,
its own weather moving over it that no one else can see.

There are days that take everything an animal has
and leave nothing over for reading the tracks of another.
The Rabbit knows this. It has those days too.

So it does not keep a count.

It does not watch to see who passed the tracks and walked on.
It has learnt, slowly, not to read a silence as a verdict.
A friend not stopping is not a friend turning away.
It is only a friend with their own ground to cross.

But sometimes one does.

Someone tired, their own load still on their back,
stops for a moment
and reads a single track the Rabbit left.

And something happens the Rabbit did not plan for.

A track it made only to survive its own weather
reaches the animal reading it.
Some have wept over them. Family. Friends.
Not from sadness alone.
From a shared memory, suddenly warm again.
From knowing the Rabbit a little more than they did the day before.

This is the part the Rabbit never expected.
That the thing it made to help itself
could become a small warmth handed to someone else.

This is the gift hidden in the sharing.
One the Rabbit did not know it was giving until it was given.

It did not start like this.

At first there was just one track, left for one animal.
A single thing it needed to say, and nothing more.

But these past few weeks it has turned into a torrent.
More and more of them, faster and faster,
and the Rabbit finds itself sharing far more than it ever meant to.

Not by accident. It chooses to now.
Because watching the warmth reach the ones it loves,
seeing it spread from track to track,
is the closest the Rabbit has come to feeling whole.

The Rabbit does not need every track followed.
It never did.

Sometimes it hands over a single track.
Sometimes a handful. Sometimes the whole trail at once.
And the reading takes whatever shape it takes.

Maybe one track, read slowly across a year.
Maybe several in one sitting, one after another.
Maybe one now, and another long after the Rabbit had forgotten leaving it.

However much was read, however little,
each gave the one thing the day does not give back.
A few minutes of a life with so much else to hold.

It only needed to know the tracks were not left into nothing.
That once, twice, here and there,
someone walked a short way beside it and found a little warmth.

To the ones who stopped, even once, and read a little or a lot.
There is no debt in it, and no expectation.
Nothing owed. Nothing waiting to be answered.

Only the thing the Rabbit finds hardest to say plainly,
and means more than it knows how to show.

Thank you for stopping, and for reading.
With a quiet hope that it left your day a touch brighter.