There is a green thing on the ledge above me that has convinced the soft quick creature it is dying, and the creature has fallen for it completely.
I know green things. I have hosted a hundred forests. Lichens that spread across my back over ten thousand years and thought themselves permanent. Great roots that split me slowly, patiently, working a crack wider through the length of an age, roots that meant it. This green thing on the ledge does not mean it.
It sits in a fired clay cup no wider than the creature's warm hand, and it does nothing but lean, very slowly, toward the light, which is the one honest thing about it.
The creature attends it like a shrine. Pours water when the top of the cup goes pale. Turns the cup a quarter so the leaning evens out. Speaks to it, I think, by the small warm movements of air. When a single leaf goes yellow the creature's heat rises and it hovers and frets, as though the loss of one leaf were an event, as though a leaf were not the most disposable thing a growing thing owns.
I have watched whole species lie down and go to stone. One leaf.
The green thing will outlast the creature. It will pass to another warm hand, or it will brown in the cup and be tipped into the earth I am part of, and either way it is a season, over before the frost pattern on my north face has finished changing.
But the leaning toward the light, that I understand. Everything soft does it. They call it caring for something. It is only the slow turn toward warmth, the same one I feel on my sunned side, on an afternoon I will not remember by the next ice.