In the great city of the East, when the second golden age of men had long since passed, countless buildings had been constructed. They towered high above the land and the horizon had become lost behind their metal, concrete, and glass. All the men and women in the great city lived in these buildings, and their feet were far from the earth. Below the streets and the buildings, they dug tunnels so that even when they walked to and fro, no man or woman’s feet touched the ground.

There was a young girl who lived on the fifth floor of one of these buildings. Sometimes she would sit up very late at night with only a single light in her entire apartment lit, and she would sew clothing. Sometimes she would read dictionaries in all different languages. She bought them at used book stores and brought them home, and memorized all the words in them. She bought books in languages she didn’t speak and in this way learned to read in all the world’s languages. Sometimes she would just sit by her window and watch the sun and the sky over the city, staring out across the buildings and down onto the streets.

When the girl was not in her apartment, she liked nothing better than to walk through the city streets and see all the traces left by men and women in the cracks of the sidewalks and the gutters of the curbs. She followed a thousand lives on a single block, and read the names of a thousand men and women all on a single street corner. Most of it was trash, and she had no illusions about this: cigarette butts and bottle caps and candy bar wrappers and scraps of cellophane. Sometimes she would find pennies and turn them heads up, but every so often the girl would find a small treasure. She found a tiny love note writ upon a paper the size of her pinky finger. She found a cheap copper ring with a plastic emerald in it, which she knew an old man had given as a gift to his granddaughter. And one day she found a small, green seed.

The girl took the seed back to her apartment. She found a pot and some soil in her closet (she had many things in her closet, and did not know how all of them came to be in her closet), and she put the seed and the soil in the terracotta pot, and put the pot on her windowsill. Though she watered it every day, the seed would not take root and sprout. She knew it was not dying, yet somehow she could not make it grow. She lay with her arms on the windowsill and her head on her hands and said, “Little seed, little seed, why will you not grow for me? You have light, life, and soil, what more do you need?”

One day, the seed answered. Perhaps it had always been speaking to her, but she had only on that day learned to understand its language. The seed said, “I am far from the earth where I grow, little girl. I cannot live on the air alone.”

Well, the girl wanted to see the small seed grow, for she knew by the language of the sidewalks it was a special seed. She told the seed all of this, how she wished to watch it grow, and she told the seed she would do anything to help. The seed told the girl how she could give it life, and it would in turn give life to her. Thus the girl held the seed in her left hand and did not let it go for three days and three nights. The seed grew without water or light, and put roots around her fingers like rings, and wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet. She plucked the tiny leaves off the plant one by one as it grew round her arm, and over the years she made herself a gown of green leaves. As long as they were in her presence, the leaves would not wilt, but stayed as supple and green as the day she plucked them.

When the gown was complete, the plant spoke again. “The time has come for me to bear a seed,” the girl understood the plant to say. “But my seed can only grow at the top of the world. Will you carry my seed for me?”

By now the girl cared deeply for the plant, as they had nourished one another for quite some time. She agreed to carry the plant to the top of the world. She gathered up her gown and set out from her apartment with the tree. She traveled out of the city and into the woodlands that beyond. Her legs did not get tired, for the roots of a tree do not get tired. As long as she walked in the sun she needed no food and when she walked in the rain she needed no water. She traveled far to the north, but so long as she wore her gown of green leaves she did not become cold.

She went further north than any living man, where the wind was so terrible and the weather was so cold that no living thing grew. In this barren land she found a mountain at the top of the world. She climbed to the top of the mountain and found there a tree, ancient and twisted, scarred by time and long since dead. “Here,” said her plant. And thus the girl placed the seed of her plant at the base of the ancient tree.

She returned to the city, but every year at the same time she would carry a backpack full of books to the top of the world, and read to the plant. She read it books in every language of the world, and in this way she nourished the plant at the top of the world. It grew into the tree, and the tree became green with life again. The girl and the plant which grew about her arm lived for a long time, and when she felt she could no longer journey between the great city and the top of the world, she carried all her books to the tree at the top of the world, and went to live inside the tree forever.