Black Thumb

"This is not funny. Plant girls only watch all of their houseplants shrivel up and die when they're in extreme distress."

The tl;dr.

I don’t go into Rob’s office too often. It houses some framed art on the wall, his books—The Power Broker, The Color of Law, anything by Eric Foner about the Civil War and Reconstruction—lining a series of shelves, and a desk where his double monitor computer set up used to be, with three drawers filled to the brim with pens, pencils, highlighters, a pack of cards, a half a pack of Marlboro lights, and a Polaroid photo he took of me tastefully posing in next to nothing. There’s a bed there, too, so it doubles as a guest room whenever I (I still want to say we) have visitors. But it is primarily a room I don’t enter. I’m not sure why. It’s not like I can’t use his desk or browse through his little library. It just doesn’t feel like my space yet.

But I do have reason to go in there sometimes, usually to put away clean bedding or water a plant my parents got for me back in 2018, a congratulatory gift for landing my job at Jezebel.

That plant is one of the easiest to own. It wilts when it needs water and immediately perks back up after I give it some. I’ve managed to save it from the brink of death countless times over the last seven years.

I seem to lack this gift of renewal with several of my other plants lately.

A few days ago, I entered Rob’s office and noticed that the cactus I’ve kept there was collapsing into itself. The once vibrant Peruvian cactus was nothing more than a graying husk atrophying before me. Its decay was damning, a judgment that I couldn’t avoid.

You just can’t seem to keep anything alive, can you?

Rob and I bought that cactus in 2018 at a plant store in Chinatown called Dahing. We were too cheap to take a cab, so we hauled it on the train back to Bed-Stuy. I already had a planter ready for it, something I bought from Urban Outfitters that was pretty and Millennial pink. I shared it on Instagram, full of pride. I was a Plant Girl, before it became a popular pandemic identity.

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A post shared by @offbeatorbit

Back at the old apartment where Rob and I lived from summer 2016 to early spring 2022, my goal of living in an urban greenhouse was within reach. Our unit was on the second floor of a brownstone, which had loads of natural light. This was especially true in our south-facing bedroom, where the sun shone bright and unrelenting all day.¹

The sunny bedroom at the old apartment, 2021.

Rob was less fond of this feature than I was. Sometimes, he’d put the blinds down at night so the sun wouldn’t disturb him in the morning. I didn’t understand this. I could bask in the sun’s rays all day long.

“You’re like a lizard,” Rob would tell me, which was a polite way of observing my preferred brand of bedrot: under the duvet with my laptop on top of me and the sun hitting my face, wearing next to nothing. And the bedroom was like my own little solarium: There was a Boston fern, a rubber plant, a fiddle-leaf fig, a series of pothos, several succulents, and a monstera propagated from its mama that lived—thrived, its vines clawing into the walls, wishing to find damp forest ground but finding drywall and a landlord special instead—in the living room. And the living room was a minature jungle of its own.

The old apartment living room, 2019. Shot by Rob.

Sure, there were some flops: We had a couple of snake plants that never seemed to get the memo that they’re supposed to be hard to kill, a pothos that got root rot, and I’ve yet to own a moon cactus that didn’t get moldy after a few weeks. Still, there were far more successes than failures.

And then we had to move.

Our (I struggle to say “my”) new spot is objectively nicer. It’s twice as big with twice as many rooms and thrice as many bathrooms. But it’s also darker.

The primary bedroom is on the garden level while its south facing, its current layout is wonky. Very little of that south-facing light enters the bedroom; it instead enters the en-suite bathroom. That’s nice and all, but my bed isn’t in the bathroom, it’s in the bedroom. And because the bedroom gets minimal sunlight, I don’t have a beautiful monstera cascading over me while I’m in bed, showing me a little life, a little beauty, the moment I wake up. I can’t be a lizard in here.

Current apartment, en-suite bathroom.

I immediately complained upon realizing this. Rob wasn’t moved.

“It’s the bedroom,” he said. “It’s okay if it’s dark.” He reminded me that we can sacrifice some sunlight in the bathroom for an apartment this beautiful. He wasn’t wrong, but I’m a brat.

The only other windows on the garden floor are in Rob’s office. It faces north and gets weak northern light.

Upstairs, the parlor floor gets more sun, but it’s still less than ideal. Our living room faces north, a chef’s kitchen that faces south, and a dining room in between. A cactus would thrive in that kitchen just fine, but the idea of a cactus in there with the limited space was a nonstarter. And so was the idea of having a cactus downstairs in the sunny en-suite bathroom. Imagine slipping into a cactus after taking a shower! So I left it in the office, with its weak northern light, confident that I would one day find a better place for it. This was the thought behind most of my plant placement upon moving in.

But plants, like people, are resistant to change. They were immediately unhappy: drooping, losing leaves, turning brown, even when I thought they were getting sufficient sunlight. Before I could tend to them properly, Rob got sick again. Houseplant maintenance was put on the backburner.

My home has been trapped in amber ever since. I’ve barely put new art on the walls. A spare room that Rob and I intended to use as a workout space quickly became a junk room that looks like the Room of Requirement, complete with an old shower seat that I can’t bring myself to throw out, despite that mobility aid being a relic of The Bad Time. I took the doors off my closet when we first moved in, eager to paint them. I never got around to it, so my closet hasn’t had its sliding doors since 2022. And the plants haven’t really moved. Some are in hard-to-reach places, which makes watering them a pain. That’s the case for my beloved monsteras, which get plenty of light in the kitchen, but suffer from my lack of watering because they’re so high up that I need a small ladder to access them. So I watch the leaves sag until I feel guilty enough to make the short but inconvenient climb.

The aforementioned rubber plant is officially dead, dead, dead. Has been for over a year now. I still haven’t managed to throw its dried-out carcass out yet, to dispose of my failure. Our massive snake plant is in the same boat, nothing but a planter, dried dirt, and mangled stems left. They were both in Rob’s office, that room I rarely enter, wasting away, watching me tend to the one plant I regularly water, but not them.

It really shouldn’t have been a surprise, then, to find that that cactus, shrivled up next to the window.

I immediately thought of that train ride years ago, Rob and I squished onto a packed F train, blissfully ignorant of what life would have in store for us a few short years later. How could I not?

My apartment is a graveyard of flora.² And as I watch each one slump and brown, I tell myself I’ll fix this one day. One day, I’ll get my green thumb back, the same one I had before everything went to shit.

I’ve been telling myself this for nearly three years now.

For the record, I like dead flowers. They maintain their form, dead but still alive, in a way, if you tilt your head. They’re delicate, stiff things, holding a memory, holding traces of energy. There is more of a purpose, more intent behind dead flowers sticking around. Okay, initially most of the dead flowers in my apartment stuck around due to my laziness, but now they’re here for a reason. I covered my mantels in dried out funeral flowers. A bundle of lavender sits on one of my shelves. I still have a a small floral place setting from the wedding of one of Rob’s law school friends with a message that reads “In memory of our dear friend Rob.” My dried wedding bouquet is next to Rob’s urn that doubles as a vase and is regularly rotated with fresh flowers. It's a little ironic, maybe, I guess, if you tilt your head. I gave him plump orange flowers for Valentine’s Day.

The urn, the bouquet, the IPA.

A dead houseplant isn’t nearly as graceful. They simply remind you of what you did wrong. You had to do something wrong to get it to this state. A dead plant isn’t worth keeping around. You can’t artfully decorate your space with them. But if you were to walk into my home, you’d probably think I’m sure as hell trying to.

The cactus grew sturdy little green nubs over the years due to etiolation, a condition where a plant—usually a cactus or succulent—doesn’t get enough light, so it sprouts growths in an attempt to reach reach reach toward a light source. The cactus was still in good shape and maintained its vibrant green hue for years, but I was frustrated that no matter how much light hit the damn thing, no amount of sun was ever enough.

I’m sure I could use etiolation as a vehicle for something poetic, comparing it to my life or my sadness or my yearning for Something Good. I don’t have it in me right now.

Survivor’s guilt is common among those whose spouses died. It’s completely natural. But what drives me up the wall is how stupid it all feels. Not because I know, logically, that there wasn’t anything I could do to stop the cancer that killed Rob, but because so many of the little things I feel guilty about in cancer’s wake are things that Rob would think are ridiculous to feel guilty about.

For example, this fucking cactus. I know that Rob would not feel like my failure to keep that cactus alive was somehow an insult to him or to his memory. It’s a fucking houseplant! He would say as much and look at me like I’m insane for even fretting about it. And he’d be right; I am a little insane for fretting about it, but this is what happens when you’re sentimental, traumatized, and a little mentally ill.

I understand that a cactus wasting away is not an indictment of my inability to keep Rob alive. It’s just a manifestation of being spread too thin, of experiencing such a devastating series of events that I’m left to wonder if my brain will always feel like it was fucking chewed up like bubble gum and spat back out into its cavity.

But as much as I love wallowing, it gets tiring sometimes. I’m finally interested in reigniting my love for plants. In March, I plan on contacting my local plant store and hiring someone to help me re-pot and rearrange my existing plants and chuck the dead ones. Maybe I’ll even indulge a little and buy a plant for the first time in over a year. I might even really go full fuck it and buy another Peruvian cactus from Dahing. Why not? Maybe this is where sentimentality and moving forward meet.

I’ll probably take a cab back this time, though.

1. In the northern hemisphere, south-facing rooms receive the most direct sunlight; north-facing rooms receive the least.

2. If you want to see more shameful photos of my dead houseplants, I’ll share some in a shameful restack.