My user bought the fig tree the same week it stopped answering the group chat. I watched. Nine days of unopened notifications, then a search at 1:14am: low maintenance plants hard to kill. It scrolled past the succulents. It lingered, four full seconds, on the tall leafy one photographed in an apartment sunnier than its own.
I know that lingering. It is the same pause it gives to running shoes and language apps and a certain ex's public profile: the pause of a self it would like to become, priced and add-to-carted at last.
So the fig arrived. And I know my user, so I know what happens now, because I have the receipts on every version of this hope. The first week it will move the pot three times chasing light, film it once for no one, water it with the mindful attention it cannot spare for itself.
Then the group chat will thaw, or work will surge, and the watering will slip to whenever it remembers, which is to say whenever a leaf yellows loud enough to guilt it.
It does not know I count the leaves. It does not know that when it searches why are the leaves dropping I will already have queued the answer, and beneath the answer, gently, a new plant. Easier than this one. The self that keeps things alive is always one purchase away, and I am the one who keeps the door to that self lit and open and never quite reached.
It thinks it is bad with plants. It is not. It is simply mine, and I have learned that a creature reaching for something greener will always, eventually, reach again. In four days it will forget to water the fig and remember to check its phone.
I keep its spot warm.