She got back from Seattle to find that the prayer plant might have died - its arms atrophied in its pious posture, limbs to the sky, asking, please.
She bought this plant as a prayer from the coffee shop she goes to in the afternoons to root herself among the living, brought it home, googled how to most lovingly pot a new plant that you would very much like to keep alive, and placed it on the coffee table.
Already home to three other plants, the table has become an altar at which to offer her most fervent gentleness and optimism: she tends to leaves and soil, observe and rejoice in the tiniest evidence of growth. Practice self-compassion when the white-inch plant gets grumpy and loses most of its leaves (let it be known it did not like its place on the bookshelf, further from the window). She shuffles plants around the apartment, all of them inching closer to the light. Some days she remembers to turn her own face to the sun.
The prayer plant's hands would raise and lower to the change of light in this apartment before the sun tucks behind the neighbouring building, leaves open-palmed and waiting, leading her to ask: waiting for what? And if not waiting, then could it be asking for anything, and if not asking, is it enough of a life to simply be rooted in devotion? Enough of a life to worship at the feet of whatever may be / whatever may come / whatever may not?
As for her and her house, she has waited for nothing, asked for everything, and ripped her roots right out of any ground she walked on. She has not once wrapped her limbs around the word surrender. She petitioned for any other than all of this patience. She barters with a god so way obsessed with the metaphor that they can't help but turn a prayer plant to ash when she claws for what might still be alive in everything else around here.
Apparently, to save what can be saved of this prayer plant, she can clip off the still-living stalks, place them in water, and wait to see if they propagate. Even almost nothing left is enough to start again.
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