Title: A Potted Plant

Date: May 17th, 2023

Author: Z. E. Wayland

License: CC0; To the extent possible under law, Z. E. Wayland has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

The plant asked the trees how they grew so tall. Like always, their lumbering voices echoed through the window. The trees answered that it takes time for a tree to grow so tall. They were the patient and kind pines, unlike their much more arrogant cousins, the oaks; at least, so say the pines. Not that the potted plant could ask anybody else. For the plant was in a pot and could not move by himself.

The potted plant was envious of the pines, seeing them tower so tall, able to stand by themselves. These pines were not bound by the whims of anybody else. They did not have someone move them around, taking them away from the sun, the rain, the wind. The trees simply breathed and lived while he sat by the windowsill in silence.

Then, one day, a storm appeared and shattered the window and hurtled him across the winds. And the pain, as he came down, delivered freedom. Pain swept through him. He had never felt such pain before. Not in all the years of life since he became a plant from a seed, not in all the years since he was cradled in the familiar ceramic of the pot.

His cradle formed a shattered star around his roots.

Eventually, the storm faded. He did not know where he landed. The storm had thrown them across the sky. It was a wish granted, but now he did not know if there was something that he could do about it. But, soon, he found beneath him there were places to find roots. It was so different, so strange. There were stones, bark, things that seemed to move beneath him, unlike what he found in his small pot. Now this strange place gave him real dirt, real plants, and real competitors.

Cutthroat wild flowers lurked to harbor the nutrients of the soil, worse than the pines and even worse than oaks. They grew tall to take the light from others. Their roots grew wide to grasp the space before others could reach it. He didn't want to hurt anybody, didn't want to compete. They did anyway. It was painful as the season rolled on. There was never a day without pain; each one harder than the last.

He was, one day, pelted with rain. The sun faded like a laugh as it sunk beneath the clouds. Days into nights into light that beamed into his leaves. Then, the rain didn't stop. The rain didn't stop. Endlessly, it continued as the sky shook with the wrath of a mournful star. It hurt. Each drop, a blunt stone. Nothing but pain and everybody felt it. It was the sort of pain that he would think that he would regret.

He missed the sun. So he grew upwards, inch by inch, to touch the sky and to find the light once more and to keep struggling against the coming storm and still the rain poured. That's when he felt something was wrong.

There was water all around him. He could feel it beneath his roots. Big strong roots that were wide, spread, and being uprooted. The water turned the soil into mud. And it didn't stop. It didn't stop as he struggled against the water, tilting, his stalk suspended like a monument forgotten. The flood came upwards faster than he could escape it. The water came up to his leaves and buds. It was the water that reached up to almost the highest part of the plant, choking his stem. The plant could feel his breath waning. This is what he wanted instead of being comforted, being cared for, being preserved as a potted plant.

But it was only out here, within the storm, that he bloomed his first flower—a bright yellow, golden flower—that perhaps may have been mistaken for the sun, as he drowned beneath the flood.