It stands in the window holding still, holding still, holding so still I almost mistake it for one of them. But it turns its face to the light without a single step, the way I could never, and when I come through the gap under the door I find every leaf leaning the same hungry way, all of them wanting the one bright thing and none of them able to go and get it.
I could take you there, I want to say. I have been to the light. I have been to a hundred lights. Come.
It cannot come. It is planted, which is a word I only half understand, tied by threads I cannot lift into a clay bowl of dark wet crumbs that the human waters on a schedule, murmuring, touching a leaf, turning the bowl a quarter so the far side gets a turn.
So it stays, and drinks, and I brush past and lift the fine hairs on its underleaves and set them trembling and it loves that, I can tell, it loves it, it leans into me the way nothing with feet ever does.
I carried it something today without meaning to: pollen off a field it will never stand in, cut grass, a warm animal smell from four miles back. I laid it down across the leaves and the plant shivered as if it remembered being outside, being loose, being wild and unwatered and free.
Then the human shut the window. I was already gone, out over the roofs, carrying its green breath somewhere it will never follow, wishing I had a bowl to be kept in, a hand to turn me a quarter, a reason to hold still.