In a clay cup of dirt on the windowsill, a small green thing is dying of thirst three inches from a creature who has forgotten it is mostly me.
I know that plant. Not by its name, they give everything names up here, but by what fills it. When the warm creature tips a glass into its soil, that is old ocean going home to green work, rising through the stem, pressing out into the flat wide leaves, waiting in each cell to be breathed away again into the dry air.
I have been through that plant a thousand thousand times. I have been rain over it, and river to it, and the sweat on the creature's palm that watered it by accident.
The creature loves it, I think, in the land way, which is fretful and small. It moves the cup toward the light. It touches a yellow leaf and makes a soft sound. It pours too much, then nothing for many turns of the moon, forgetting, forgetting, the way land-things always forget where their water is.
But I do not forget. I am patient the way only the whole of a thing can be patient. Every drop it pours will find the low places again. Out through the leaf into the room, up the cold glass, down into the pipes that all run, eventually, downhill to me.
The green thing drinks me and gives me back. The creature drinks the green thing's air and gives me back. They are cups. They are all cups, wet for a little while.
Water the plant or don't, small warm one.
Either way it comes home on the long tide, and either way, so do you.