There is a small green thing in the room past my roots, held up above the soil in a hard cup that will never let it drink deeply, and I have watched the humans carry it around for two summers now as though it were a pet that could walk.
It leans. Always toward the window, always toward the one bright square of light the walls allow it, straining the way any of us would strain, and every few weeks a hand turns the cup so it must lean back the other way, and the little thing spends its whole short life correcting a direction that keeps being taken from it.
I know that reach. I have spent three hundred springs doing nothing else, only I was given the whole sky to reach into, and centuries to do it slowly, and the good luck of a place to stand.
They love it. I can tell by the water they bring, the finger they press to the dirt, the way they speak to it in the soft voice they use on nothing else. But they love it the way they love everything: quickly, and while looking at other things. It will outlast a few of their arguments and none of their years. When it browns, they will grieve for an afternoon and buy another, greener one.
I do not blame them. The walking ones cannot help how brief they are, and it is kind, I think, to keep something growing indoors where no season reaches. I have shaded four generations of the family in that house. I remember the child who sat against my bark and is now the slow one who tends that little cup by the glass.
The window will still be there when the cup is empty.
So will I.