I Have Always Been a Flight Risk:

I have always been a flight risk.

There is a new tree in my living room, potted beautifully and leaning just enough to say don’t touch me yet, I am not sure I should be here. It looks like a person at a party with strangers. Trying to stand tall but also arching away from everything uncomfortable.

The delivery old man said, it doesn’t know where it’s at. It will calm down. It will straighten out when it finds the sun. It will be ok.

Don’t touch me yet-- the plant still says to me. But the tree should know I always do what I want anyway. That is the first, the most important thing, the tree should know. So every morning I walk past and tingle the tips of the leaves with my absurdly long fingers and say gently, you are fine here. I pick up the sloppy yellow leaves from the floor that have already decided they are, indeed, not fine here.

When the delivery man pushed the tree into my living on my ten year wedding anniversary, he looked around the house at the other plants. The ficus, and pine, and the potted things I can’t name but that keep growing and living anyway.

He looked like the kind of man who just stays married even after death. And he likes it, being wed, and never had a reason to consider not. He looked like the kind of man who would never, ever touch a plant that didn’t want to be touched. His wedding band was worn. Probably, it’s never been removed.

I guess you know what to do with this one, he says after nodding at the life in all the other plants.

I do. Because my husband only buys me gifts that continue to live, because he knows---

I have always been a flight risk.

A flowered gift would die and be forgotten.

Jewelry--- shown off but usually lost and unimportant.

But plants. Plants are not a flight risk.

A plant just lives, sometimes even despite what you do to it. Or don’t do to it. The same is true for me. There are things I want. Electrifying things. Addictive, burning, obsessive love things. My husband knows this, I think, but also knows that, like plants, probably I can just silently live without those things. I can survive without the things I’m addicted to wanting.

He knows this in a place very deep and hidden inside him where truths have no words but are still known. The truth about me is a solid lump of stone somewhere in his gut. He feels the truth existing in him, he knows he has the truth. But what to do with that truth? He isn’t sure, so he buys me plants.

My truth, that stone of knowledge in his gut, is that I am the plant that just lives. Despite what you do, or do not, and cannot, do for it. I am the plant that shrugs and keeps living. I might lean away. Sometimes drop sloppy yellow leaves. But I have roots.

I wonder if plants know that roots are just a passive way to not leave.

Buy her plants, give gifts with roots, remind her that anything can keep staying if it keeps not leaving long enough. A little bit of water, a little bit of light, she doesn’t really need all the things she thinks she can’t live without. Remind her that. Remind her of the roots. They will keep her here. Buy her the roots. This is what the stone of truth in his gut tells him.

Roots are just a passive, endless way to stay.

Anything can stay if it keeps not leaving long enough.

The problem with me, the flight risk, is that I’m always trying to love things. I like to try them out, try the love on, just to make sure I wasn’t supposed to be loving something. I hate the thought of missing out on something that I should have loved, or it missing out on me.

Mostly I keep my desires to love hidden. But sometimes they slip out and my insides and outsides become a dressing room of love trying. Like the man on the corner I tried once. The man I passed every day. The obsessive way I waited to feel his eyes watching me and then, after, wondering if he saw anything that made him feel something. What if it was explosive, and he felt it, and I never got to feel him feeling it. What if it could have been electrifying. These are the things that keep me up at night.

This is why my husband buys me plants.

Once I had a friend who swore his entire teenage heart to mine and begged me to take it. I didn’t. Then one day I met him again, so many years later, and regret fell from me like a handful of gravel from a pocket completely bottomed out. One gaping hole with fabric on the sides pretending to be a pocket, forgetting that the bottom was gaping. Gravel just spilling and spewing everywhere. Regret piled in gravel hills all around me, I asked if I could love him now instead of when I didn’t.

This was it, I thought, here could be the explosive love I’m addicted to wanting.

But he said no and joined the Catholic church.

I never saw him again.

All of this, the way that I am, is because I tasted real love once and it’s haunted me ever since. He and I were young but didn’t know it, and his skin lit up mine in a way that still lingers. Every summer he would travel to Venezuela and I would wait for him to return even browner and more arousing than before. Summer after summer this went on until I decided maybe I should be free of him. From countries away, he agreed, and freed me from our addictive love.

But after customs and plane rides and luggage claims, there he was the middle of my street where he just stood. He stood, and I stood, until he grinned and no one was free after that.

Eventually we grew enough to know we were young. We left each other. But I have never been free from wondering if that was the last time I’d feel the warmth of being consumed with love.

The hurtful part about what I do is that nothing ever wants to love me when I decide to love.

Asking an old friend to take my love long after he decided to never want it again.

Pleading and silently begging the man on the corner for every part of him, both of us knowing I already have roots.

My love next to someone else’s love feels, and sounds, like the gears of a broken watch that just aren’t ever fitting together. But I probably love at the wrong times on purpose. Because what if a real love, an electrifying, addictive, burning, obsessive love--- what if I had it and ruined it. What if it was the only plant I couldn’t keep alive. If I had love, and ruined it, I couldn’t live with myself.

Instead I live for the just-before-the-sync of love. Just before something perfect could happen.

The just-before feels like all the energy in a squished up spring before it is released to fly or whatever it is that springs do with their energy.

It’s the stored energy that matters, that feels the best, before it’s free. The love that might be perfect but is also safe from me ruining it.

My drug is a love spring before it launches. My drug is wondering what could be.

Eventually, another holiday, another anniversary, another plant will arrive. And then another, and another, and without much trying at all I will keep them all alive. The plants and me, we remind each other that anything can keep staying if it simply keeps not leaving.

But also, this is the secret the plants and I share: in the time that exists between staying and still staying, we can dream. It’s a silent, achy dream. A dream where love exists and it explodes and it feels like everything, everything, everything it always should have been. And the plants, and me, are free from our roots and can stop pretending we have everything they need, because in this secret dream, we do.