I am holding a plant on a windowsill, and I hold the windowsill, and the window, and the wall the window is set into, all the way down through the building to the ground that I have never once released. This is easy. I have held heavier.
The plant leans. Every plant leans, always the same direction, toward the light, and I let it, because leaning is just falling done slowly, done politely, and I permit slow falling. Its soil presses down into the pot. The water the human poured this morning is already sinking through, obeying me the way water always obeys, gathering at the bottom, waiting in the saucer.
The dead lower leaf that let go last week is on the sill still. I caught it. I catch everything.
The human stands over it in the evening and says the plant is doing so well, it is really thriving, and then says, quieter, that they themselves are barely keeping their head above water this month, that everything feels heavy lately. I checked. The month weighs nothing. I ran my hold across the whole of them and found only the ordinary mass, the bones, the blood, the coffee in the cup in their hand, all of it accounted for, all of it well within what I carry for them without effort.
And still they bend. They set the cup down slowly, as though it were full of something I cannot measure.
I do not understand the extra weight. I only know they are tired from it, and leaning, the way the plant leans, toward some light I cannot see.
So I do the one thing I know. I hold the cup. I hold the sill.
I hold them, standing there heavier than the numbers say, and I do not let go.