he brought it up the way he brings up most things—casually, mid-something-else, as though the idea had just occurred to him in a moment of ambient ease and not been quietly developing in his brain for three weeks. we were watching something, i can’t remember what, and he gestured vaguely at the corner near the window and said: “i think a plant would be good in there.”
i didn’t say anything for a moment. i looked at the corner, which currently holds a standing lamp and, if i’m being accurate, nothing else—no table, no object, no claim. just the lamp and the wood-look vinyl stretching out beneath it like a diplomatic void. a plant, he said. as though it were a simple thing. as though i hadn’t thought about this already.
here’s the thing about plants: i love them. this is the problem. if i didn’t care about them, a fiddle leaf fig would be a prop—water it when i remember, let it fail on its own terms, feel neutral about the outcome. but i do care. i care intensely about plants in the way that i care intensely about everything i allow into this apartment, which means that a plant is not a plant—it’s a commitment. it’s a light situation. it’s a watering schedule that will be consistent at first and then fall to every-ten-days and then to “when is the last time i watered the—” and the conversation that follows. i know exactly how this goes.
julian’s argument is that the living room feels unfinished. and he’s not wrong, technically—i’ve been noticing the same thing about that corner since the lamp went in. but his theory of what “finished” means is different from mine. his version of finished involves a living thing in the corner that will grow slowly and green up the wall and make the room feel like a place where something is, as he put it, “happening.” my version of finished involves getting every inert object right and then stopping. i do not need the room to be a place where something is happening. i need it to be a place that has been considered, set, and left to hold its shape without requiring attention.
a plant requires attention. that is its entire premise.
we haven’t had the formal negotiation yet. we’ve been circling it—he mentions the corner, i look at it, we move on. the idea is in the apartment now the way ideas are once they’ve been said out loud: sitting somewhere between potential and obligation, waiting for me to either adopt it or make an affirmative case for the corner staying as it is. which is hard, because the corner is not, at present, an affirmative case for anything. the lamp is doing its job. the floor is doing whatever managed-community floors do. there’s nothing wrong with the corner except that it has no opinion about itself, which is exactly the problem i solved on the nightstand and have not yet solved in the northwest quadrant of the living room.
what i’m going to say to julian is that i need to find the right plant before i commit to a plant—the same way i needed to find the right lamp before i could commit to a lamp. that the wrong plant would be worse than no plant. a pothos or a snake plant acquired because it was the first thing i saw at the checkout line would be the corner’s equivalent of the placeholder: functional, opinionless, and quietly announcing its own inadequacy every morning for however long it lasted.
what i can’t quite say yet, because it’s a little too honest for a tuesday evening on the couch, is that the real hesitation is simpler. this apartment is ten weeks old. the kitchen has reached something like peace. julian makes popcorn in the cast iron on weekends now, without being asked, which i have decided is a reliable indicator of household stability. a plant would be the first thing in this apartment that could die—the first thing that would require the room to actively sustain it rather than simply hold it. i’m not sure the apartment is ready for that. i’m not sure i am.
but the corner does need something. i know it does. and julian, who suggested paper plates at the outset and has since come around to everything i’ve argued for, is probably right about this.
i’m going to look at a plant this week. just look.
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