I have a very special plant in a pot and it is dying. My best friend Michael works at the botanical gardens, and he told me that my plant had not much time to live. So I decided to give my plant a name because it deserved one. It has always been there for me—in the fading orange pot on the windowsill—since I got it for my twenty-seventh birthday five years ago, and now it was going to die, so I decided to call it Love because I thought it rang true.
That was almost nine days ago at six forty seven in the afternoon—I know because I looked at the clock on the wall—when Michael told me that Love was going to die in ten days. He came to visit me with his wife Marianne and as always they brought me lots of fruits and vegetables, and canned food like white beans in tomato sauce, and meatballs in Mexican-style gravy, and they also brought me a bunch of movies on DVD, and when they left it was seven fifteen, and Love had nine days and twenty-three hours and thirty-two minutes to live.
So I turned on my computer and went on the Internet because everything can be found on the Internet and I read articles about plants healed by music and for the past eight days I’ve been playing my cello to Love.
I played music to Love only in major keys because Diana, my cello teacher in high school, used to tell me that major keys are the happy keys. But everyday Love seemed to wither: it drooped and its leaves yellowed at the tips and then turned brown and like a skin disease the discoloured patches spread all over Love’s once healthy stem.
And it hurts because I didn’t want to stop, and now the fingerboard is sticky with clotted blood because I cut two of my left hand fingers and after four days I snapped the A string and then the D string and everything I played sounded low. And then my bow broke so I could only play pizzicato, and my right hand fingertips became sore and then developed blisters and it hurts and I cannot play anymore.
I usually watch one movie at eight o’clock in the evening right after I eat and take my pills, but since Michael and Marianne left, the DVDs have been lying on the low coffee table exactly where I told Marianne to put them. I told her to put them there because she had to bend a little and I could see a bit of her breasts.
I’ve never had a girlfriend, but if I could, I’d like her to be like Marianne. I remember one time Michael brought his cello and we played duets, and Marianne wore a blue woolly jumper and she leaned with her elbows against the windowsill, just next to Love, and later she said I played beautifully. But she lied because I know I didn’t because I was nervous because I felt her staring at me all the time. I think that she thought it was nice of her to say, so that I would feel better, but I wasn’t sad at all that afternoon, just nervous.
Marianne is beautiful. She is thin and she wears colourful clothes, especially in winter, and she always smiles at me whenever our eyes meet, and then I smile back. Michael once told me that he loved her but that they couldn’t get pregnant and I nodded but I didn’t really understand. He said it was complicated. It was Marianne who gave me Love for my birthday.
Love is naked. It has one day to live. I put all its leaves in a pile and thought about burying them but that would require leaving the house and I don’t do that. I hope Love won’t die in pain but when I said that to Michael he laughed and said plants don’t feel pain, but then I read on the Internet that they do, and botanists should know that, so I think that maybe Michael lied to me.
I met Michael in the youth orchestra eighteen years ago. We sat next to each other at the last cello desk and shared a music stand. I turned the pages and in the breaks we compared bows and fingerings, and then we would just talk, at first about music, and then Michael talked about parties and about girls and I listened. And during the week between rehearsals, I would imagine living his stories, and on Saturday nights I wouldn’t sleep because I was too excited for the next day, the Sunday rehearsal, four until seven o’clock.
Michael used to go to another high school so he didn’t know he was my best friend, and when I got ill that year and was sent to that hospital, he came to visit me once, and then he was gone.
I was so happy when he came back in the summer, almost three years later. I remember he entered the room I shared with another ill person, and he sat there on the blue stool, and he told me about Marianne and about the university and then he said he was sorry. He stood up and he hugged me and I was so happy and we both had to cry.
My mother Lori used to tell me that I was ill and that’s why I needed to keep Michael close to me, because I didn’t have siblings or anyone else to care for me. I wasn’t sure what it meant to keep Michael close to me. She said to be nice and always welcome him, and call him from time to time. Soon after she died, six years and two hundred and forty one days ago, Michael arranged to move me to my current flat. And since then, every two weeks on Sunday, between four and seven in the afternoon, he comes to visit and he brings me food and movies, and sometimes he brings his cello and we play music together. I make sure I’m nice and welcoming, but I never call him.
I woke up this morning and I know it sounds silly but I thought Love looked unhappy as if knowing it was its last day. And then I remembered an article I read on the CNN website about an old man from Oregon in America who had only two weeks to live, and he asked his family to disconnect him from all the tubes and the machines so he wouldn’t feel the pain of the illness killing him. So I thought Love must feel the same so at six thirty five in the afternoon I took Love out of the orange pot and cut off all its roots, and I think Love is dead now.
A few minutes ago I called Michael, something I had never done before. He asked if there was anything urgent. I said that I wasn’t sure, that it was about Love. He asked who. I said the plant, Love, that I cut off its roots and that it was dead now. He said that he expects me to call only for urgent matters and that we would meet in four days. I said okay and asked if Marianne would come with him. There was silence. Then he said no, that she was ill, and it would probably take some time before I see her again. But it took him some time to respond, and I could hear that he was sad, and I think that maybe, maybe Michael has lied to me again.