If you love Rust -- use Rust. Trying to find a language that's just right for you risks it being just that: right for you and few others.
Just remember that even if writing memory-safe programs is your goal, using a memory-safe language is just a means to that goal, and even Rust isn't really memory-safe. Many Rust programs try to achieve memory safety while using a non-memory-safe language (be it C or unsafe Rust), and there's an entire spectrum of combining language features that offer sound guarantees with careful analysis and testing of unsafe code to achieve a safe program. On that spectrum, Zig is much closer to Rust than to C, even though it offers fewer guarantees than Rust (but more than C).
Just remember that even if writing memory-safe programs is your goal, using a memory-safe language is just a means to that goal, and even Rust isn't really memory-safe. Many Rust programs try to achieve memory safety while using a non-memory-safe language (be it C or unsafe Rust), and there's an entire spectrum of combining language features that offer sound guarantees with careful analysis and testing of unsafe code to achieve a safe program. On that spectrum, Zig is much closer to Rust than to C, even though it offers fewer guarantees than Rust (but more than C).