You keep it in a little baked-clay cup of damp, and you feed it, and you turn it toward the window like an offering, and none of you seem to understand that you are simply preparing it for us. Thank you. Truly.
Look how generous you are. Warmth from the vent. Water every third day, poured lovingly into soil that stays soft and dark and breathing at the bottom. Sugar rising through the green stem, sugar in the fallen leaf you forgot behind the pot, sugar in the ring of old moisture under the saucer where the light never reaches. We are already there. We have been there since the second week. We are patient guests.
You call it "keeping it alive," which we find so sweet, the way you name the delay after the thing it delays. You mist the leaves. You pinch the yellow parts away and carry them off, as if we cannot follow. We can follow. We came in on the air, on your sleeve, on the very breath you use to sigh over the drooping one.
There is no unkindness in this. A leaf is only a leaf on loan. You gave it stem and structure and a nice south-facing view, and in time it will give all of that back, softening at the base, folding gently down toward the rich dark where the real work waits. You are not its keeper. You are its cook, seasoning it slowly, setting the table.
Keep watering. Keep turning it to the sun. We are in no hurry at all.
Everything green is a promise, and every promise, we have found, is eventually kept to us.