Root System

Day 153 – April 25, 2026

I’ve been thinking lately about the things that keep me alive.

Not in the dramatic “what is the meaning of life” sense, where everybody suddenly starts acting like grief automatically makes you wise and ethereal and very good at sitting near windows.

I mean practically. Emotionally. Spiritually. Like, what actually keeps me here when the day is heavy, the anger is clean, the disappointment tastes metallic, and my heart feels like it’s carrying more than any respectable organ should have to?

That kind of here.

And the truth is, I am not held together by one thing. It’s a whole system now.

Writing is part of it. Roger is part of it. My closest people are part of it. Coffee is, embarrassingly and unmistakably, part of it. Beauty is part of it. Curiosity is part of it. Spite, on occasion, is absolutely part of it and I continue to believe spite deserves more academic respect as a renewable feminine energy source.

But so are my plants.

Especially Lenny.

Lenny is my limequat tree, and yes, I am obsessed with him. As I should be. He is wonderful. He is dramatic. He is alive in the exact way I need something alive to be. I check on him like a woman with emotional range and no intention of pretending otherwise. I look at his leaves, his little shifts, his progress, his whole tiny citrus existence, and somewhere in all that caretaking I remember that life is still happening in small green ways right in front of me.

Roger loves him too, which feels correct. Roger has strong opinions about most things worth loving, and Lenny clearly passed inspection.

And it’s not just Lenny.

It’s the other houseplants too. The whole quiet green congregation. The little living things I water and rotate and fuss over and keep near me like proof that care still matters, that attention still matters, that something can keep growing inside the same apartment where I have had to survive so much.

That gets me, honestly.

Because plants ask something very particular of a person.

Patience. Consistency. Observation. Faith without stupidity. The willingness to believe in slow progress. The understanding that life does not always grow loudly, but it is still growing.

That’s a lesson I have needed.