Rust

You need do nothing – it will come, with the rains as well as the sea air, and time of course, the most ravenous of constants. 

It’s funny how they never teach that hunger, all the world’s destruction curled up in that single letter tucked away as just another afterthought in so vital an equation, the physics or the chemistry book quickly moving on to more exciting forces and mixtures.

The blue paint flakes away from the fender of the old Ford, picked off like the scab it is, the gears of the van beside it quietly, incrementally exchange iron for rust in their hunger for oxygen, are ever slightly looser and less perfect, their tight embrace beginning to lose its familiar, necessary intimacy.

It won’t bother you so much, if at all, until things are forced to a crisis.

It’s that way with a lot of things. 

And then at once you’re far from home and something vital has finally given way and you are forced to see things as they are: the disorder now obvious, as well as your now apparent lack of planning.

And so, there’s nothing for it – you replace what you must, salvage what you can, and then go right back to doing all you can about it, which in the end is really nothing: it will come. It always does.