Overfed & Starving

I recently bought some houseplants to liven my living space up a bit.

It’s the natural progression of an unnatural life – take plants from all over the world, put them in little plastic tubs and litter them around your manufactured man-cave. 

Still, I like ‘em.

Three of the five found a home together outside, in a long, rectangular ceramic pot sat on the lip of my balcony, basking in the late winter sun. The other two; a little flowering bush and a hanging vine both slotted comfortably into nooks on either side of my apartment. 

Progress had been good for the indoor-livers. The bush sat in a porthole window above my desk, enjoying the same sun as his outdoor companions. Its stems arch into a C towards the light – coaxing the occasional turn from me to dish out fair distribution. The vine sat quietly in the corner, adding a dash of greenery to the room, but never begging to be the centre of attention. 

Outdoors however…things are less positive. 

One of the three (we’ll call her Sunfire) seems healthy enough – her leathery green leaves apparently unfazed by the freezing conditions at night. But the other two aren’t faring so well. Takion is just a collection of thin sticks poking out of the dirt, like a tiny colossus’ ribs in an ancient boneyard – and Milly doesn’t even have that to show. A limp tangled knot of squidgy stems strewn slap-dash across one another. 

I dig the flags out from behind each one of them to check if they are all frost resistant and they are, so the flurries of snow beginning to settle on the dirt around them shouldn’t be a problem. I had been watering them every day with a spritz bottle, though never too much – so I didn’t think that was the reason. Maybe they just needed a little boost to get them going? I put the flags back into the dirt and come in to wash my hands. 

Luckily, I have just the thing. 

I open the bottle of plant food and recoil from how hideous it smells. Even Frank (my cat) bolts from the other side of the room to the other side of the apartment. Glancing at the label, which is in Dutch, I ignore a long list of calculations and explanations to hone in on the only one that felt important – 3-5ml. I pour the toxic sludge into the lid up to the 3ml mark – figuring they were only small plants, so better to err on the side of caution. One by one I dab a splodge on the soil around each of them, spraying it afterwards with the bottle to soak it in a bit, finally repeating the process with the plants inside. I pour it directly into the middle of Beano (the house-bush), and just on the outside edge of Viney. 

Satisfied with my problem solving, I screw shut the supposed sustenance and send it back to where it belongs: out of sight at the back of a shelf. All that was left to do was to await the plants’ arrival within the week. 

I pass by the thermostat and turn it up on the way to my desk, zipping up my hoodie to sit down and start writing. Instead I just lean back in my chair and look out at the snow coating my terrace; a week before it had been 17 degrees, now it’s -6. The window above me is a swirl of twinkling blue and white diamonds, the individual snowflakes leaving their unique patterns against the pane. The warmth of gratitude seeps out from my core and I take a moment to steep myself in it, accepting the beauty of something so magical and yet so ordinary, before finally getting to work on procrastinating. 

I run my usual gauntlet – sipping on a coffee and letting my attention bounce between whatever whims it’s powered by, waiting for an answer to form for the blank page and the ticking cursor hidden beneath all the tabs. 

I don’t tend to use social media much – I was an avid Facebook user for many years and I dabbled in Twitter, but never got into Instagram (thank the lord). I’d made an active choice to limit my usage, as the imperceptible feeling of sadness that I’d feel after a binge had become all-too-tangible these days, and I didn’t see the benefit anymore. 

YouTube however, is a different matter. 

I place my phone to the left of me, propped up by the little metal stand at the back of the case and hit the top video – a group of guys talking about the same thing they’d talked about since I’d stumbled on the channel a year previously – football. The conversation centred around the topic of a proposed restructuring of the football league in England. It was actually something I’d already heard talked about on similar YouTube channels I followed, which I often had playing in the background as I pottered around the house. 

I drift between looking at fantasy football related sites and sending messages to friends on my laptop; looking at possible purchases (that a tiny part in me is certain will bring the elusive happiness that I tell myself not to seek), and ticking off menial tasks to ramp up to the greater productive act of actually writing something. 

One of the hosts of the show is uncharacteristically amped up and it draws my eye. 

“-Marcus Rashford had to force the governments’ hand to FEED HUNGRY KIDS, while just this week they’ve given out an £800m PPE contract to a company that didn’t exist until 6 months ago, has 3 employees, and they’re all linked to the Conservative party-“

I’d actually seen this already on one of my brief forays into the Twittersphere. 

“The worst thing about it is-“

Another guest chimes in.

“There’s almost no way this doesn’t happen – or if not this then we’ll just launch straight into a European Super League. Teams will play all over the world against other European giants, raking in the money from a world tour. They’ll never need to play in their home stadium again. The community that existed around these clubs will disappear, all for the sake of profit.”

The video ends and I start up another, opening a tab on my laptop to research the topic further – suggested articles appear along the edges:

“COVID-19 worldwide death toll reaches 2 million.”

“Global air pollution is increasing despite lockdowns.”

“BLM protest crowd run down by police car.”

“Suspected genocide denied by Chinese government.”

I don’t open them – perhaps don’t even realise I’ve seen them, but they each add an extra pound to the blanket of hopelessness around my shoulders. I close the article and go back to my blank page. The cursor ticks away silently. A metronomic representation of my lack of power. What can I even say? What can I do? 

I send messages to friends about how I’m feeling, trying to find solace in our mutual struggle against the weight collapsing in on us from every angle. In the silence before their responses, I lean back again in my chair. The cursor accuses me, but my eyes are on the window. The swirl of snowflakes painting brief unintended masterpieces still goes on, but it’s no longer accompanied by the warmth of gratitude – rather now by the icy claws of fear. Not fear so strong that I sat there trembling and quivering, in fact I probably didn’t even recognise it as fear at all, but as I shut my laptop and turned on my playstation it was in search of a place where my actions felt meaningful. Where I could win, or at least where my loss didn’t feel so inevitable.

The days drift into each other, as they are wont to do when you’re a passenger in your own life. The reverberation of a million voices debating the world in my mind, and I couldn’t even tell if mine was one of them. 

I ritualistically watered the plants every morning, but to no effect. If anything they were worsening. Even Beano, who had previously been flourishing, now hung limp in the pot, wilting from the middle and radiating outwards from the dark ring I’d placed there in the hopes of helping. 

I reach to the back of the shelf and pull out the bottle, checking the label more thoroughly than before:

3-5ml… per litre of water. 

Oh.

I pace between the victims in their various states of decomposition and google what to do. The first and most convincing answer was to try and flush the systems of the food, so I bring them all into the bath and do just that. I fill each pot with water until the dirt is saturated and streams murky puddles out from the bottom of them, leaving it for ten minutes and then doing it again – as if I was performing CPR. 

The prognosis was not good. 

After I’d done it enough times to be sure that more wouldn’t help, I brought them back to their positions and left fate to do the rest, inhabiting the same spot I had for weeks, sat at my desk to stare back at the blank page staring at me. 

I take my phone out and start scrolling through YouTube again, trying to find a distraction from the silence, but nothing stands out. 

So I keep scrolling. 

And then I stop. 

I put my phone face down on the desk and look back at the screen.

It was agony to begin with. The disquiet of the silence around me. The itch to cover the buzzing in my mind with one from outside. 

But I sit. And I stare. And somewhere between half and three quarters of the way through the cursor ticking on and off, I write the first line of this essay. I could hear the litany of questions I had for myself more clearly now. They were separate enough to even think about trying to answer them. 

Questions like: 

Why do I know the names of more US senators, than I do of my neighbours? 

Why do I feel so totally overwhelmed sometimes? 

Could it be because I’m bombarded with information about how the world is dying, and animals are going extinct at an alarming rate, and that companies and governments make decisions that only make things worse? And that even though I know this, I can’t do anything about it, bar recycling the resources I do use? Yet remaining aware of this fact feels like a duty. 

Knowledge is power, I suppose.

But is it?

The ostrich is often maligned for burying its head in the sand, because the idea that you wouldn’t want to know any and all available information about your environment seems absurd. But our environment has changed. The scope of our landscape has shifted from tribal, to local, to country wide and now to global, and it’s just too much information to process. 

Maybe it’s okay not to know. To be willfully ignorant. Centering yourself in the space around you, rather than trying to keep abreast of every atrocity and death knell of decency across the world, if all that knowing will do is blind you to the tiny beautiful everyday things in your life. 

This morning I got up and watered the plants, and in the darkness of the soil I saw a little green sprout forming; beautiful and unimportant, but enough to give me hope.