I Want to Be Remembered by a Plant I Never Watered

I used to own this small potted plant I kept by the window. 

I don't remember its name—some hardy, leafy thing they said wouldn’t die easily. I believed them. That was the first lie. Or maybe the first faith.

I never really watered it. Not on purpose. Not out of malice. Just... I got busy. Or I thought the sunlight was enough. Or I told myself I’d do it tomorrow, and tomorrow kept moving without me.

Strange, how we forget to care for the things we once chose.

Eventually, the leaves curled in, quietly. No protest. No drama. Just a slow folding, like a secret being buried alive. And still, I left it there. Watching. 

Witnessing. 

Me, in all my distractions.

And it makes me wonder—what else have I left thirsty? What else did I promise life to, only to offer absence?

Sometimes I think about legacy—not in the grand, carved-in-marble kind of way, but in the intimate, quiet ruins we leave behind. The forgotten promise to a hopeful person that we didn't really gave much though. The half-read book with a name scrawled on the inside cover. A plant, dry to its roots, still reaching toward a window that never closed.

I want to be remembered by that plant.
Not because I nurtured it, but because I didn’t.

Because maybe that’s the truest shape of memory—not in what we gave, but in what we withheld. Not in blooming gardens, but in wilted stems that once hoped.

That plant knew me.

 The me that forgot. 

The me that tried. 

The me that never quite got it right.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe being remembered for our silence, for our absence, is still a kind of presence. Still a kind of truth.

After all,
even the unwatered things remember the hands that almost touched them.