soiled

when someone asks “how are you holding up?” i don’t know what to say. the answer is generally “pretty bad,” but punctuated by enough moments of extreme joy that the answer becomes, truthfully, “fine”. my day-to-day life is dull and utterly devoid of creation. even the things i was starting to enjoy during my “time off” have evaporated. i haven’t been to the gym since i hurt my ankle. i can’t even remember the last time i cooked anything. every night i come home with a strange knot in my stomach that only makes sense once i remember the unholy cornucopia of picket line food i’ve ingested for the day (black coffee, granola bar, pizza, ice pop, sandwich from Questlove — the food pyramid has fallen).

for the past several weeks, i’ve been too exhausted to drag myself to get groceries, rationalizing the avoidance by telling myself i’d also be too tired to cook and it would all expire anyway. so i subsist on free picket food and the occasional restaurant indulgence, stretching out the leftovers over days. last week was my birthday, so the fridge is stocked with lovely treats from friends to fortify my arsenal against starvation. it may not be healthy, but i am not hungry.

i cave into a scroll through the site that has consumed much of my youth and ungratefully vomited it back out. like much of the internet, it’s a borderline unusable cesspool now, but it still has its moments. it’s amazing any social media ever actually “worked”, considering it is, by necessity, an incomprehensible blend of complete strangers, desperate brands, chaotic bots, and people you know with varying degrees of intimacy, all of us fumbling at some nebulous sense of community while pissing our every thought into the wind. 

for instance, somewhere between the 10th and 957th barbenheimer joke of the day (i love them all!), i notice someone i used to sleep with share a post that gives surprising insight into what they like in bed. i realize our last encounter, while perfectly adequate for me, might have been lacking for them. the gradual cooling over the past few months suddenly makes sense. it’s jarring to encounter something that obliquely impacts your real life between quips about cillian murphy visiting his gynecologist. i’m also vaguely irritated i’m finding out via a meme, when i could have found out the old fashioned way (i.e. human speech), and we both might have had an even more enjoyable evening. i wonder, for the billionth uninspired time, whether the internet is more catalyst or mirror. have people always been this strange? or is it just more on display? i guess i’m not much better, writing about it here.

oh well. sex is an audition and sometimes you don’t get a callback. i don’t dwell on it, but keep the new information on layaway in case the opportunity presents itself again.

without fulfilling (or any) work, home-cooked meals, exercise, sex, or meaningful hobbies, i am left to seize on small, passing beauties. a cute dog or baby can buoy me for hours. when i allow myself to purchase a (non-alcoholic) beverage, i close my eyes and savor the sensation of liquid pooling over each of my taste buds. i get politely stoned in the middle of the day and sit on benches around the neighborhood like some sort of retiree (a dying profession!). the last time i was marooned without a job, i wasn’t living anywhere half as beautiful as this.

our apartment is beautiful, too. my roommate has an incredible green thumb, so the place is lush with flora. whenever people compliment it, i give him all the credit (not that anyone who knows me would assume i could be responsible), but still feel like i’m laying claim to something i have nothing to do with. whenever he’s away i get to water them, and luxuriate in the task. watering plants is the perfect chore: it requires two hands, prohibiting any cellular distraction, but it’s simple enough that your mind is free to wander. folding laundry and vacuuming are close seconds, but until Tide gets its shit together, neither of those fill your home with the scent of earthy afterglow. tilting your wrist to trickle a stream from a watering can (inherently bespoke, even if it’s plastic) into thirsty soil can make anyone feel gentle, ethereal, effortlessly fertile — like Drew Barrymore in Music & Lyrics, who appeared to have parlayed plant-sitting into a sustainable career.

my roommate’s horticultural talent is tragically not contagious, but i do feel the foreign impulse to make something grow of my own. like most of my recent personality developments, it’s impossible to tell whether this is a natural consequence of aging, post-covid PTSD, sobriety, or a pathetic attempt to regain some semblance of my recently-shattered creative outlet. whatever the cause, it’s a lot less destructive than some of my other impulses, so i give in easily. i buy a snake plant, a tiny cactus, and a plant whose taxonomy i cannot remotely recall, which should tell you everything about my qualifications to be a plant parent. i then let too many weeks go by, during which i remember to water them but not much else: without proper pots, they sit patiently in plastic limbo until the café/flower shop near my apartment has a sale on ceramics. there’s a compact vase i’ve had my eye on for a while — an audacious leopard print, which i usually never go for, softened by a palatable stripe of teal. very 70s. it would look good with the snake plant and overall vibe of our apartment. as a rule, i love any accessory that might make a guest wonder, “did david bowie ever do blow here?” and at 40% off, i can no longer resist.

the process of repotting brings a level of stress i have to imagine is on par with surgery. i haven’t done this in a long time. i might never have done it, actually; more likely i stood uselessly beside my mother while she did all the work.

i inherited plenty of things from my mother. a knack for gardening was not among them. i forgot how exposed the roots are at the bottom. the soil crumbling around them feels too much like blood spilling out of veins. panicking, i scoop up what i can with the doomed desperation of Jackie Kennedy in the back of the Lincoln. 

the vessel is the tiniest bit too narrow; i shouldn’t have trusted my ability to eyeball it. but eventually the compact dirt obliges, slipping inside with an ease i don’t quite trust. it’s not until the job is done that i realize this vase may actually be a cup.

regardless, it looks happy in its new home, if tilted at a strange angle. i’ll rotate it and hope its crawl towards sunlight will even it out. despite my own black thumb, i’ve always loved plants’ catlike instinct to seek out the sun, a reminder that they really are alive. in 4th grade i did a science project where i talked to plants & played them classical music to see if they’d grow faster, compared to a control group i would ignore. the experiment proved nothing, since i felt too guilty to actually ignore the control group, and because the “study” i’d based the hypothesis off was undoubtedly total bullshit. (what scientific journal would i have even been able to access?? i was 9!) but i enjoyed doing it. tending to them made me feel close to something holy.

once it’s all settled, the soil redistributed, i see something i hadn’t spotted in the old pot: a tiny shoot of bright green, brand new, peeking out below its siblings. the sight of it makes me worry this was all wrong, too much, too soon; that this transplant will inevitably kill it. the vase i loved so much was always destined to be a grave; a manifestation of my failure, once again, to make anything beautiful last.

eventually the anxiety ebbs. the plant does not wither before me. i bask beside it in the sunlight, resting in the pyrrhic comfort that the worst is bound to come — but not just yet.