*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.