The cart is full at 11:47 on a Tuesday. The grower is in Chiang Mai, the listing is a mother plant of Anthurium papillilaminum with a leaf the color of wet asphalt, and the price, converted, is somewhere between a used motorcycle and a small surgery. My banking app is open in another tab. The wire instructions are pasted into a notes file. My thumb hovers.
I have, over six years of collecting, hovered like this maybe a dozen times. Sometimes I press send. More often — and this is the part nobody writes about — I close the tab. Not because I came to my senses in any noble way, but because something specific, small, and usually pedantic interrupted the hypnosis. A petiole cross-section in the third photo. A grower's reply that took eleven days. A leaf shape I'd seen before, on a much cheaper plant, under a different name. What follows is a catalog of those interruptions.