Staying alive

I only have three living things in my house, besides me. They aren't things of beauty, they don't add much to the decor and I never know quite where to put them. They have followed me here and this is the fifth home they have cohabited with me. Five places I've called home in the past six years and one of them was home for three years, you do the math. Every time I move I think I am going to lose them but they, like me, just keep hanging in there. I'm not much one for growing things, odd considering my love for the natural world, but my thumb is not a lush rich shade of green. I don't ever completely forget about them; I'm hardly nurturing but if I lost one it would hurt me, it would. The first one came from my brother, it was his and it's a scrawny spidery thing in a small clay pot and I swear it has nine lives. It doesn't grow, hasn't grown in years and it hangs loosely over the side of the pot and it has been so close to dead that I have all but given up on it but it refuses to die, just has some slow life coursing through it and it won't die, it just won't. My father had it in his garage, no light, no water, I mean this thing was gone, no pulse and I took it and fed its thirst and it thanked me and lived. It's not well but it is still gracious.

I'll tell you about the second one next because of its relationship to the spider thing that gets all curled brown and never has new growth but grips the dry soil it calls home with a vise like tenacity. Technically I guess you could say it was my brothers too since someone sent it to the funeral home as a tribute when he drank himself to death. It's some ficus thing and over half of it has died out and the one branch left crawls toward light and like the spider plant it never has new growth and at a certain time of year, I can't really remember if it's spring or fall, it acts like it's going to just give up the hunt for light but it goes into a dormant like trance. I water it and I can never remember when you are or aren't supposed to fertilize but once in awhile I do and it never seems to provide a boost of any kind. What's strange is no matter how I place this plant or the other one, the spidery one, they reach toward each other. I swear. You might say, well it's the light, they are seeking light, nuh uh, they face each other. Every time. If I put them in seperate rooms you could draw a line from scraggly growth to scraggly growth, you could, it's true.

Number three is from when I got sick and I can recreate in my mind every day of that month which is this month no wonder I'm writing about this, huh? Not much dramatic about green thing number three. Just a large leafed thing that blooms these beautiful white flowers once a year or so that came from a company I did business with so they felt obligated to send something to the hospital since I meant millions of dollars of business to them. That was nice of them though, huh? About half of this thing has died off too and I had a woman once who cut and trimmed and repotted and gave it mouth to mouth and I think it was as nearly dead as I was but together we breathed new life into it and it just recently bloomed those white flowers all sexy and they drop this stuff that reminds me of something sexual and I imagine it is because pollen and stamen and that white powdery dry cum like plant life blood is as much sex to this thing as my sticky sleep with it on my belly cum is to me. And that is the point exactly.

These three living if not thriving entities each represent something about life and survival to me and while two of them serve as a reminder of life no longer lived, one very much reminds me of life clung to and a second chance. I think that's why I don't buy anything else to green up the place; it just wouldn't be the same. Sorry if this is hard to follow but my fingers didn't keep up with my mind.