Every potted plant once left a patch of green in your life.

Last June, I bought a potted plant. When I bought it, I just felt that the little plant's leaves were emerald green, a small clump of verdant freshness under the scorching sun, pressing right at your eyes, like a pair of hands tightly gripping my heart. Without hesitation I picked up the pot and asked the shop assistant, "What plant is this?" "I don't know either," the assistant said with a smile. I paid in cash and took this nameless plant back to the lab.

Such a verdant plant, I placed her on the desk in my lab. When tired, I always liked to stare at her for a long time; in the tiny, dense leaves there seemed to be a vast world. Yet the green leaves dimmed day by day, until they turned a dead, ashen white. Three weeks later, she finished her life; she should have had a longer life.

When I first bought her, my good friend told me, "You must take good care of her, don't water her with boiling water." "How could I water her with boiling water?" I found it amusing just thinking about it. But why did she go? Perhaps my friend was not wrong; sometimes, when she is about to go, all your efforts are like boiling water. By the time she left, I did not even know her name.

Right when I bought my potted plant, a girl in the lab planted a pot of tomatoes. When my potted plant died, her tomatoes had just sprouted. Pale green, tender stems, each about one cun long.

"This pot is too small. When I bought it, I sowed too many seeds; by then there probably won't be enough nutrients," the girl said with a smile.

Three days later, I filled a discarded large foam box from the lab with soil and transplanted that small pot of densely growing tomatoes into it. I also picked up a dry branch to serve as a trellis for the tomatoes. Compared with my potted plant that had lived for three weeks, the tomatoes grew very well. Before long, the tomatoes had climbed all over the dry branch. Every morning when I came, I put them on the windowsill in the outside corridor to sunbathe. At night, I moved them back to the lab. Finally one day, among the green leaves and branches, a small pale yellow flower bloomed.

Looking at the little yellow flower, the girl and I were very happy. "Will they bear tomatoes?" the girl asked. "Maybe they will," I said.

Before she could bear fruit, "winter is coming." It turned out they had grown so densely. Later, they withered one by one, until the last one fell; by then it was almost the winter vacation.

When I came back after the semester started, only the aloe that I had planted beside the tomatoes as a foil back then had survived. On the bare, cracked soil stood the green aloe. Only those plants willing to survive can give you truly meaningful moving moments.

A few days ago, the girls in the lab bought quite a lot of longans. I put the leftover pits into a foam box and planted them. I hadn't held out much hope, but unexpectedly, a week later, sprouts emerged, and now they are about one cun long too.

A few days ago, a senior fellow student gave me two spider plants. One I placed on my desk for water culture, and the other I planted in another small foam box. I think before long more greenery will grow.

Sometimes, I wonder, what plant was that very first potted plant? Can I still buy her at the flower shop from before?

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Yunyun Ke:

The footprints that once existed in life, I want to record them little by little.