The Hare And The Tortoise

What’s your favorite animal?

For the longest time, I didn’t have an answer. Or rather, I had many—changing with the season, with the mood, with the version of myself I happened to be inhabiting that year. But if I’m honest, the answer that has followed me most faithfully is this: the tortoise and the hare.

Not as animals in the wild, but as archetypes. As ways of moving through the world.

The tortoise knows something the world keeps forgetting. That life is not a sprint. That arrival is less important than attention. That wisdom accumulates quietly, like sediment, invisible until it becomes unshakeable. The tortoise doesn’t rush toward meaning; she lets meaning meet her where she stands. She carries her home on her back. She doesn’t abandon herself to be loved.

And then there is the hare. Brilliant, restless, dazzling in motion. The hare is desire incarnate—speed, charm, urgency. He lives in the future tense, always chasing the next horizon, always one step ahead of his own fear. The world applauds the hare. He looks like freedom. But what no one tells you is that speed is often a disguise. Sometimes, the fastest ones are running from something they don’t yet know how to hold.

Finding Noir was born from this tension.

Kayra is the tortoise—not because she is slow, but because she is deliberate. She stays. She listens. She holds space even when it costs her something. Noir is the hare—quick to love, quicker to flee. He runs not because he doesn’t care, but because caring asks him to stop.

This is not a fable about who wins. It is a story about what happens when two ways of being collide. When stillness meets velocity. When love asks not to be chased, but to be endured.

So if you ask me today, “What’s your favorite animal?”
I’ll tell you this: I love the one who stays.
And I love the one who runs—until he learns why.

Finding Noir is a meditation on love that isn’t tidy, timing that isn’t kind, and connection that doesn’t disappear just because someone leaves. It’s for anyone who has ever loved across different speeds, different fears, different readiness.

Some of us are born tortoises.
Some of us are hares.
And sometimes, loving is learning how to meet each other on the same path—without asking either to become something they’re not.