From here your houseplant is not still. It is a slow green firework, frozen mid-bloom, the whole arc of it visible at once: the seed folded tight in soil, the first pale bend toward the window, the leaves unrolling one after another like a sentence you are still finishing. The dry brown edges you noticed this morning are already here, and so is the deep waxy green of its best week, and so is the pot it will outgrow.
They stand side by side for me, all of it, one shape.
You keep looking at it and thinking you have failed it. I can see you doing this right now, the small guilty glance from your chair. But the underwatered droop of a Tuesday you have forgotten is touching the moment your grandmother pressed your hands into soil in a kitchen that smelled of wet earth and coffee, teaching you which end goes down.
You are still doing what she showed you. From where I stand those two hands are the same hands.
You water it too little, then too much, then you talk to it once when no one is home, quietly, the way you will still murmur to small growing things when your knees ache on the way down to the garden bed decades from now. The plant does not need the words. You do, and you always will, and here you already are.
You think you are keeping it alive. You are keeping each other company through a long green afternoon that, to me, has no ending and needs none. Nothing here ever wilts all the way.
It only leans, always, toward the light, and so, look, do you.