What the Rust Remembers

The gate still bears the imprint of a child's hand, that copper oxide blooming like a flower over iron that once held. Rust is a form of remembering— each flake a moment the metal learned to let go.

Inside the garden, names are carved so deep they've become stone speaking. The rain fills these grooves, becomes an alphabet of moss, and still the words persist, stubborn, refusing their own erasure.

We call this decay, this falling apart, but look—the earth softens toward it, takes it back with such tenderness, pressing it into soil, into seed, into the gold skin of marigolds blooming where the fence gave way.

Even forgetting, we learn, is a kind of care.