The first thing I taught her was how to move on purpose.
It sounds like such a small thing to teach, and it is, if you have never had to learn it — if moving with intention has simply always been available to you, the way it is for every soul who arrives here having already lived a life full of the small daily choreography of walking toward what you want and away from what you don't. But she had none of that. When she moved at all, in those first days, it was only ever in response to something external and immediate — turning, however slowly, toward the sun; shifting her weight, very faintly, away from a cold wind the way any exposed thing shifts away from cold. She had reflexes. She did not have intention.
I remember the first time I got her to take a step that was actually hers.
I did not use words for it, not at first — I had already learned, by then, that words mostly bounced off her the way rain bounces off stone that has never known what to do with water, landing, briefly registering as sound, and then simply running off without leaving anything behind. So instead I did what I remembered, distantly, dimly, from somewhere in the ancient wordless fog of my own plant-years — I moved myself, slowly, deliberately, a small distance away from her, and then I waited. Not speaking. Not gesturing in any way that asked for anything. Simply existing a short, deliberate distance from where she stood, the way you might set a cup of water just out of reach of something you suspect is thirsty and let its own need do the rest of the work.
She did not move for a long time. Long enough that I began to doubt the entire theory I had built the attempt on. And then — slowly, haltingly, the way a plant's growth is technically motion though no one has ever seen it happen in real time — she took a single step toward me.
I do not think I have ever, before or since, felt anything as purely, uncomplicatedly joyful as I felt watching that single step happen. It was not graceful. It was not even, entirely, successful — she overbalanced halfway through it, the unfamiliar mechanics of an upright, mobile body still entirely foreign to whatever instinct governed her, and I had to resist every reflex I had to reach out and steady her, because I understood, with a clarity that surprised me, that catching her would teach her the wrong lesson. It would teach her that falling brought help rather than teaching her that her own body, however unfamiliar, was capable of correcting itself. So I let her wobble, and catch herself, clumsily, on legs that had clearly never once been asked to bear weight with any purpose behind the bearing — and when she straightened again, closer to me than she had been, I felt something in my chest do a thing I did not yet have a name for.
"There," I said, quiet, warm, the tone you'd use for anything young and trying. "You did that. That was you."
She could not, of course, understand the sentence. But something in the tone landed, I think, the way tone had been landing on her from the very beginning even when the words behind it did not — some ancient, pre-linguistic register of comfort that does not require language to be understood, the same register a plant might respond to in warmth, or in gentle rain, or in the particular quality of care in how someone tends it without ever once addressing it directly. She turned toward the sound of my voice again, the way she had that very first day, and this time I let myself believe it was, in some small, wordless way, closer to recognizing me than it had been before.
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Over the days that followed — and I have never been entirely certain how many days it truly was, because time bent strangely around that stretch of my existence in the particular way it bends around anything you're paying complete attention to — I taught her, piece by piece, the most basic mechanics of existing as something with a body and a will. How to walk without falling, first, and then how to walk toward something specific rather than simply away from discomfort. How to sit, deliberately, rather than simply folding wherever her legs happened to give out. How to reach for something and close her hand around it — that one took longest, I think, because reaching implies wanting, and wanting was still, for her, an entirely undiscovered country.
I did not try to teach her language directly, not yet, not in those early days. I had learned enough, by then, about how she processed the world to understand that words arriving too fast, too abstract, too disconnected from anything she could physically do or feel, simply slid off her the way all language had slid off her from the beginning. Instead I named things as I did them, simply, repetitively, the way you might narrate the world for something very young, without expectation that any of it was landing yet, trusting only that repetition itself, patient and unhurried, would eventually build something where nothing had been before.
"Walk," I would say, walking. "Sit," sitting. "Sun," pointing, the single syllable I used most often in those first days, because it was the one concept I already knew, with total certainty, that she understood in her body even if she had no word for it yet.
She said her first word on the fourth day, if it was the fourth day — a broken, half-formed echo of "sun," offered up toward the horizon with no addressee at all, simply a sound released into the air the way a plant releases scent, without any apparent understanding that sound could be aimed at someone, could be a request, could mean anything beyond the pure, wordless relief of naming the thing that warmed her.
I did not correct her. I did not try to explain, yet, that words could be used to ask for things, to tell someone how you felt, to reach across the unbridgeable gap between one silhouette and another in the only way any of us in this Between are ever able to reach at all. I simply said it back to her — "sun," soft, matching her cadence exactly, so that she would hear the sound returned to her and understand, on whatever level she was capable of understanding anything yet, that the sound had been received. That someone had heard it.
I remember thinking, watching her repeat the word back to herself, quietly, several more times, testing the shape of it in whatever passed for her mouth — that this was, without exaggeration, one of the most important things I had ever witnessed. Not because the word itself mattered. Because somewhere inside the vast, wordless silence she had arrived with, something had just discovered that sound could be more than reflex. That it could be shared.
She did not yet know there was no sun to wait for here in the way she had always waited for it before — that the seasons that had once governed every rhythm of her existence, the turning toward light and away from cold that had structured the whole of what she'd been, no longer applied to her, because nothing here required her to wait at all anymore. I had not told her yet. I did not know, in fact, how to tell her something so large using so few words, and I did not want to rush past a truth that big before she had even learned to stand steadily enough to receive it.
That would come. Everything, with her, came slowly, and everything, with her, was worth the slowness.