My wife overwaters the fig. Always has. The pot sits in a saucer, and by evening there's a shallow ring of water the roots couldn't drink, and she frets over it, tips it into the sink, sets the whole thing back on the windowsill so the leaves catch the last light.
Here is what I know that I did not used to know. That water came out of a tap, which came from a reservoir, which came from rain, which came from an ocean, all of it moving inside a film of atmosphere thinner, proportionally, than the shell on an egg. I have seen that film edge-on. A pale blue seam holding everything we have ever had against a black that does not care.
And she is worried about a fig.
I don't correct her anymore. I used to. Now I watch her turn the pot a quarter-inch so the crooked side grows back toward the sun, and I think about how nowhere else, in any direction, for distances I cannot make my mouth say out loud, is there a single leaf. Not one. We are the only address with plants.
The fig is doing fine. New growth at the top, two leaves the size of my thumbnail, unfurling toward a window on the third floor of a building on a coast of a country that has no line around it when you look down from up there.
She tips the saucer. She sets it back. She keeps a green thing alive in the one place green things happen to be possible.
I go get her a cloth for the water on the sill.