How to love

She gave me a spider plant that I left in water for seven months and it drank it over and over again in the time I could never seem to find to go to the store to get it soil. When we – I can’t say ‘said goodbye’, because we were still meeting at night in other cities once in a while, but I can say when we broke up – broke up, I got myself four plants and some soil. One died immediately: the ivy. I found the spider plant neglected there in my room with no water to drink and dry brown root imprints on the small glass cup it lived in, and I gave it soil and water.

It is a month later and it has quintupled in size – still only a tenth of the one she cut this one from to give to me. Women always have more robust plants. They know to give them love. That is why even in seven months of neglect this plant lived on strongly – because it had felt love. It knows of it, it waits for it. That poor plant doesn’t know it’s stuck with me.

But it’s luckier than it knows. When it was loved there was no score kept. It was loved for growing and doing nothing but being a wonderous spectacle – it was never expected to give fruit or to fall dead for fuel.

The spider plant now lives with the plants I got myself; they have grown big now too. I talk to them how I imagine a father talks to his child when the mother is dead and he tries his best. I talk to them with tears in my eyes.

If I strain my mind hard enough and listen to the right song I see orange. I see a strange mash up of images. Texts she sent with pictures – a girl I barely yet knew, orange sweater and an orchid in her hand for her grandmother.

If I strain to pull together my weak and fleeting thoughts I can feel the train move down the tracks along the coast and feel the sun come in orange and gold through the window and the eucalyptus in the evening and me anticipating you; and you there, in San Diego, not knowing what I felt because I was just a boy you saw once in class.

Pulling one memory often pulls another, and so with this one came a month later when I took the same train and arrived in Santa Barbara after dark and you drove up to meet me. I got in your car in a pizzeria parking lot and felt so at peace and so complete and though I’d not seen you for weeks and we’d kissed only once or twice we abandoned all caution for our hearts and made out with the desperate intensity of breathing after being pulled from water.

I remember not wanting to say a word as we left the parking lot. It’s been many times now that I’ve learned how dumb my words can be. I knew too, that what was unspoken was at odds – maybe unreconcilably – with the spoken. But you could speak and I listened contentedly, with my quiet hands in my lap in the dark and the occasional muted yellow of the street lights. I stole kisses from you at the red lights. You drove us an hour and a half on a dirt road into the mountains and we were both separately scared. You played strong. You didn’t play when you got upset though, but as long as I took your orders and didn’t ask too many questions, you were happy. It was a hard happiness to tend. But I did, for two years, because the joys of your happiness were divine: your hugs, your smile, your kiss, your kindness, your forgiveness. When I slipped I started lower than before, a more arduous job to tackle and my desire to tend it shrank.

So now I just strain and strain and strain to remember those early moments of true intimacy and anticipation. I was a stupid little boy and you a stupid little girl – for we breathed pure bliss unknowingly. Maybe you understood, then, what I didn’t and may never.