 |
| Bree and Me |
Not the polished, academic kind. The raw, immediate kind—seventeen syllables that capture a moment before it dissolves. We send them back and forth across the miles like small offerings, like proof that we're both still here, still paying attention to the world and to each other.
There's something perfect about haiku for long-distance friendship. The form doesn't allow waste. You can't perform in seventeen syllables. You have to distill your truth down to its bones and trust the other person will understand the whole cathedral you're building with just three lines.
Bree always understands. Her haiku come back like mirrors—like she's been living inside the same moment I just captured, seeing what I see, feeling what I feel. Or maybe we're just tuned to the same frequency, two people who've learned to speak in compression, in implication, in the spaces between words.
autumn moon rising—
we both see it, miles apart,
writing the same light
Sometimes we'll be working on the same theme without planning it. I'll send her a haiku about loneliness and she'll respond with one that threads directly through mine, like we're co-authoring the same poem across state lines. Other times we challenge each other—she'll send me something devastating in its simplicity and I'll try to match her precision, her ability to crack a feeling open in three lines.
The haiku exchange is how we stay close. Not through constant communication or the exhausting labor of maintaining connection across distance, but through these small, deliberate moments of witness. I saw this. I felt this. I'm sending it to you because you'll understand.
And she does. Always.
your haiku arrives—
seventeen syllables that
say: I see you, too
We share other things—dreams, struggles, the mess of our daily lives. But the haiku are the heart of it. They're how we practice showing up for each other, how we prove that distance is just logistics, not a measure of closeness.
Maybe long-distance friendship requires this kind of distillation. When you can't rely on proximity or casual hangouts, you have to be deliberate. You have to actually communicate. And haiku forces that—forces you to say what matters in the smallest possible container, forces you to be clear about what you're offering.
Bree and I have built something solid out of syllables and time zones and the commitment to keep writing to each other, keep bearing witness to each other's moments, keep saying I'm here even when we're not.
miles mean nothing when
your words arrive like daybreak—
distance, just details
Thank you, Bree, for teaching me that closeness has nothing to do with geography. For proving that friendship can be built in seventeen syllables. For being the kind of friend who shows up in the form that matters most—present, attentive, real.
For writing the world with me, three lines at a time, across whatever distance separates us.