A Story About a Plant: Part 4

An End…

The dieffenbachia thrived once I moved it to the living room in front of the mirror. It became the star of my plant kingdom, its leaves taking focus and garnering comments in every mirror selfie I posted. Cute outfit but TELL ME ABOUT THAT PLANT?! I was amazed at how easily it lent itself to my life. I would occasionally sit in a chair opposite it and look at it when my apartment was quiet, maybe after a long day of trying and failing to turn ideas and feelings into words that others might understand and possibly agree with or at least appreciate having heard, a task that feels a lot like trying to act out a dream to an audience of strangers in a game of life-or-death charades. The curvature of the plant and its elliptic-oblong leaves gazed back at me, looking like a frozen dance, an arm rounded, a spine arched, inhaling grief, exhaling stillness, a hushed impassivity that tells me not that everything will be alright, but that the lack of alright is, at least for this moment, alright.

The yellowing of the first leaf began like question or a vague thought in the back of my mind. Was that leaf always kinda yellow? Then the yellow would grow, spots working the leaf from the outside in, each day the death becoming harder to deny. I would clip the leaf, wipe the plant down, wonder if it meant something and then forget about it. At some point I noticed the plant had acquired powdery mildew, which I understood from my research to be largely harmless if dealt with. I made a milk spray in accordance with the directives of the…