*on your child going to college in Christchurch, NZ and velvet worms*
By mid‑August the garden already practices absence — stems turning hollow,
the robin leaving its notes hanging in the air like torn corners of a song.
Under the chirp of palmetto bugs, a log eases itself back into earth.
Inside, hidden from the light, a velvet worm does the impossible: offers
herself to a spill of pale, blind threads. For days she is nothing but
hunger turned outward, spinning glue not to hold but to feed, until their
tiny jaws harden and, like rain, they slip back into moss, leaving her the
damp and the slow work of being only herself again.
It's a kind of mercy, this leaving — clean as the way geese carve open the
sky, each V a blade that does not return. You pack your fragments — old
Defcon badges, a frayed pentester lab shirt, dreams with edges I've never
seen — into my old suitcase. On your dorm wall next to a shattered
cathedral, you'll make a collage of faces, new maps where I am just blank
space beyond the frame, like unexecuted shellcode left on the heap. The
house darkens into its own bark. I wander its rooms like a soft thing
without eyes, tasting the air for what I once held. There is a moment in
every season when what clung must fall. Even the velvet worm stops spinning
sweetness for a brood that has grown teeth, and the log swallows its
secrets—the bacterial smell of old rain, the echo of digital footfalls we
never learned how to trace.
