I have had the same Pothos since 2016. It has moved four times, lived in two cities, been cut back twice, propagated three times, and now lives on top of a bookshelf in a second-floor walk-up in Greenpoint.
The cuttings
In 2018, I left a man and a sublet in a single afternoon. I took the Pothos. I did not take much else. A cutting from that plant is now growing on a windowsill in Lisbon, where a friend of mine lives. Another cutting is at my mother's, in Ohio, trailing down the side of her bookshelf in the room that used to be mine.
The plant does not remember
Of course, the plant does not remember any of this. A Pothos does not have a narrative. It has only the present light and the present water, and it arranges itself accordingly.
But I remember. The plant is a set of coordinates I have kept steady through a decade. It means that no matter where I have slept, I have had, first thing in the morning, at least one living thing to look at that knew the previous apartment, and the one before that.
