There are three varieties of the pothos vine in my apartment. The golden pothos is green, splashed with a mild yellow variegation, like dappled sunlight came to live in the leaves. My human mother has several of these in her house. She sends me a video that traces one of the vines along her walls, trying to connect over the few things we have in common: a need to grow winding plants, an attachment to the evidence that we’ve stayed somewhere long enough to warrant a vine doubling, tripling, in length. I ignore the video; there are more wounds between us than longing and lonely stems can knit closed.
I bought my neon pothos from a website. It was so delicate when it arrived, I felt like it hadn’t been a plant for very long. The bright lime leaves were too soft, their stems too thin. I worried about it and kept it on the sill of my bedroom window, watering it more than the others, wanting it to get bigger, stronger. It spent its first week with me wilting like my heart.
The marble queen pothos was an impulse buy from a grocery store on Sixth Avenue. It was so full, spilling out of its pot, and I wanted my life to feel that full. I still want my life to feel that full.
There is a cord I have that’s the same color as my neon pothos. It charges my portable speaker when it works, but right now it doesn’t work; it’s tied into a slipknot and shoved into the bottom drawer of an expensive dresser I bought in Soho when I came into money this year. There is a video on my phone that shows the neon wire knotted to one end of a pink flowered scarf, a lime-green noose. The other end of the scarf is tied to a thick metal rod stretching across the wood of a wardrobe in my Berlin hotel room. My pothos is too weak to do anything, but this cord is a better vine; it holds my neck when I kneel inside it, pressing against my carotid artery. (This part is not in the video.) I am investigating how to hang yourself by partial suspension. An online forum offers specific instructions, including pictures of successful corpses. The hotel mirror catches my reflection, flesh swollen under my jaw, and revulsion cuts me. I slide out of the noose and crawl to the bathroom floor, curling up like a dying shoot, hyperventilating into the tile. A few hours later, I cancel the rest of my tour and fly back to my apartment. I have been away for a week. In that time, three of my thirty plants have died, but all the pothos vines, even the sickly lime one, are alive. Almost, but not quite, like me. Two of them have new leaves.
It is possible to propagate a pothos vine from a cutting. It’s easy, in fact, as long as you preserve a node; just place it in water and it will grow roots. You can keep it there if you like, watch the roots grow and tangle like confused loss, like hope, like they’re searching for solid ground. It won’t die. It won’t rot. It will spill in two directions, insistently alive despite the amputation, glorious with its wounds. It’s not easy to kill a pothos; that’s why some give its name over to the devil.
It’s not easy to kill me either. I am, at once, the person most bent on my death and the person most successful at keeping me alive; even the devil won’t take me. After Berlin, I decide to propagate a vine of myself, to trace a node that has a chance at being happy, sever the stem beneath it and plunge it into water that perhaps understands what being loved feels like. It seems important to start over, to graft varieties onto myself: a jade arm, golden eyes, speckled silver legs, a marble queen throat. To move like the vine does—slow and languid, but determined, made of photosynthesis and direction instead of pickled pain.
The slipknot is still in the drawer. When my speaker runs out of battery, I will need to untie it. The neon pothos is doing better; a few leaves have turned brown and I’ve plucked them off, but the rest seem sturdy. It drinks in the late-afternoon light; a bright leaf curls over the lip of its terra-cotta pot. I suspend the golden pothos from a corner of my living-room ceiling, by a steel hook and a golden chain. When the vine gets long enough, I will direct it over my walls and windows, evidence that I stayed alive long enough for something.
I take a cutting of the marble queen pothos, three leaves and a branched stem, and put it in a glass jar of water on my desk. I’m waiting for it to grow roots, small wriggling white things that don’t need the ground. I make sure the sunshine bleeding through my window brushes against the glass. The wound on the first plant will close over, like wounds should.
I wait for mine to catch up.