Terraform

We planted oxygen factories on Mars and called it progress. Lichens in pressurized domes, algae blooming green in water we dragged from the poles like a confession extracted under duress. The soil here remembers nothing. Four billion years of silence and then us— loud, desperate, certain that if we just add enough nitrogen and time, we can make anything love us back. I tend the greenhouse on Sol 437. My tomatoes are small and defiant, red flags planted in rust-colored regolith. They taste like earth. Not Earth— just earth. The difference is a capital letter and eight months of travel and everything I left behind. At night the sky is wrong. Two moons instead of one, smaller, faster, like hearts that beat too quick to sustain anything as slow and stubborn as hope. But the lichens grow. The algae bloom. And I keep planting in soil that remembers nothing, teaching it to hold.