Houseplants We Promised to Love

We filled the apartment with houseplants

the way some people fill it with children—

hopeful, underqualified,

carrying more Pinterest than practice.

They came with names we didn’t ask for:

“Low Maintenance,”

“Hardy,”

“Impossible to Kill.”

We believed them, the way we believed

We were immune to ordinary failure.

You lined them up along the window,

a tiny forest on a rented sill—

pots like open mouths

waiting for weather we controlled.

Watering them felt like an oath:

A small, green contract that said,

“We can keep something alive

on purpose.”

Then work bloomed stress,

and stress bloomed insomnia,

and insomnia bloomed

forgetting.

The soil didn’t die all at once.

It receded,

like conversation,

like sex,

like the way we used to laugh

with our whole faces.

One by one, the leaves curled in

like fists refusing to fight.

The ivy withdrew its paragraphs

from the wall.

The fern began to speak

only in brown.

We said, “We’ll fix it this weekend,”

as if time were a watering can

waiting patiently in the corner.

But plants don’t understand “later.”

They understand

light,

water,

and whether the hands that touch them

are actually here.

When the fiddle-leaf fig dropped

it's last glossy certainty,

You stood beside it

like a doctor with bad news

and said,

“It is fine; we’ll buy another.”

But we both knew

It’s never just the plant.

It’s the version of us

that swore we’d do better

than our parents’ kitchens,

their dusty spider plants

hanging like unanswered questions

over the sink.

So we cleared away the dead,

left a lineup of pots—

empty,

embarrassed,

rings of old damp at the edges

like coffee cups

after long arguments.

For weeks, the sill stayed bare,

a crime scene tape of sunlight

stretched across nothing.

Then one morning

You came home with a single

stubborn succulent,

It's leaves fat as commas,

pauses in a sentence

We hadn’t finished.

“This one,” you said,

“only needs a little,

But it needs it regularly.”

We wrote its schedule

on a sticky note

and taped it where

The groceries go:

Milk, eggs, soil, us.

We take turns now—

water on Mondays,

checking the soil with a finger

The way you check my pulse

When I’ve been too quiet.

We don’t pretend anymore

that we’re “good with plants.”

We say,

“We’re learning

how not to disappear

on things that depend on us.”

The windowsill is still

more hope than jungle,

two pots and a maybe.

But today, a new leaf

unfolded without fanfare,

a green flag

in the silent war

between intention and follow-through.

You held it up to the light,

smiled like a person

who’s forgiven themselves

for every wilted yesterday,

and said,

“Look. It believes us.”

For the first time,

I did too.