The Distance Between Us

Memory, recognition, and the legacies we carry — September 21st - 27th, 2025

New to Brittle Views? This space spans grief and mischief, punk nostalgia and quiet reckonings—essays, fiction, satire, and stories that don’t sit still. If you like writing that lingers as much as it lands, you’re in the right place.

This week circled the spaces that open between us—and the choices we make about what to carry across them. In Love, Said Out Loud, a father’s warmth endures decades after his death. Not in grand gestures, but in everyday kindness passed down. In Holding On, a mother’s long-hidden letter returns her voice to the hospice room. She urges her children to forgive and reconnect. Silence still pressed at the edges. And in A Respectable Distance, Maggie B. brushes against the past in an antique shop, reminded that recognition is sometimes a jolt in the chest—and sometimes a choice not to speak.

Together, these pieces suggest that distance is never just absence. It is legacy, shaped not only by what divides us but by what endures despite it—love spoken, letters saved, silence respected, and the quiet repair of bridges. What we carry forward is measured not only by memory or restraint, but by the tender bridges we dare to build across the distance between us.

Here’s everything from the last seven days—each one carrying its own corner of that truth:

Essays

Love, Said Out Loud

A remembrance of a father who chose kindness over the hardness he inherited, leaving a legacy that still endures—proof that love doesn’t fray with time.

Holding On

Chapter Nineteen – Holding On

A mother’s letter, long kept in a drawer, unsettles old patterns in the hospice room—urging her family to forgive, remember, and keep telling the stories that remain.

Short Stories

A Respectable Distance [Narrated]

On a Women’s Institute outing to York, Maggie B. learns that recognition isn’t always about naming the past. Sometimes distance itself is a kind of grace.