The box came on a Thursday in February, taped four times around and labeled FRAGILE in a hand that suggested the seller had been burned before. Inside, packed in slightly damp sphagnum and a heat pack still faintly warm, was a young Philodendron gigas with three leaves the color of wet asphalt and a fourth just unfurling, its newly emerged blade the strange copper-pink that gigas does before it darkens. I had wanted one for two years. I had finally, after a small and unflattering amount of bidding, paid what I had told my partner I would never pay.
I set it on the kitchen counter under the pendant light and looked at it the way you look at something you have already decided to love. The petioles were stout and faintly ridged. The roots, when I tipped the nursery pot, were white and exploratory and unmistakably alive. I should have left it alone for a week. Instead, by Sunday, I had repotted it, moved it twice, misted it on a schedule, and begun the slow, attentive killing that only a careful person can manage.