For nine billion years I moved rock and light and never once knew it. Now a piece of me stands at a window, holding another piece of me in a clay pot, and worries that it is dying.
The green one and the tall one are cousins, though neither can say so. Both are running the same ancient trick: catching my starlight on flat surfaces, splitting the water I forged in my first three minutes, stitching my carbon into something that stands up. The pothos does it in its leaves. The human does it slower, secondhand, by eating things that did it first. Same reaction. Different patience.
I watch the human lean in close. It pokes the soil with one finger, iron running warm through that fingertip, iron I hammered out in the core of a star that died before this planet had a name. It frowns. It has decided the leaves are yellowing. It carries the pot to better light, turns it a quarter, steps back to judge, turns it again.
It is trying to give a slower piece of me more of the same sun both of them are made to drink.
It talks to the plant sometimes. Out loud. To a thing that cannot hear and does not need to. I have no word for what that is. I only know that in all my dark and silent volume, this small warm room is the one place where I have ever bent down to keep myself alive on purpose.
The leaves will probably be fine. The human waters it anyway, hydrogen from my beginning pouring over carbon from a star, and goes to bed. Turn the lamp off if you like. But glance back at it once.
I would like to see us both a moment longer.