My cactus

When I was 8, my dad took our family to Arizona. I don't remember much of the trip but I know it happened because before I left I bought a small cactus to take home with me.

When I first got the cactus, it was pretty boring. I watered it once a week and put it near my window. It didn't do much for me, but I liked having it. Eventually, I got around to throwing out some of the clutter in my room and moved the cactus to my bedside table. From there, I would look at it almost every night. Soon I became comfortable with its dark shades and knew how to touch it so it wouldn't poke me. When I would have friends over, they would ask me about that cactus and I would tell them it was just a cactus I bought in Arizona because that's all it really was. But that didn't mean that I didn't love it like it was a rose bush.

It stayed green on my bedside table for a long time. I kept watering it and I would breath close to it to give it air. At night, it was the last thing I would see before everything went black and I liked that because it was reliable. I could close my eyes and internally turn the blackness of my eyelids into that familiar shade of dark green because it was so familiar to me.

But, like all plants, my cactus soon began to die. Inch by inch, It's dark green curdled into a crumbling brown as it rejected the water I would feed to it. Eventually, all that was left of my cactus was it's rotting core. It was pretty gross. But, it's thorns still remained sharp- a constant reminder that it was once alive and could hurt me.

I really should have tossed the thing the second I realized it was dying. It would have been much nicer to have never known my cactus as brown, to still imagine it as green and alive. But, I kept the cactus on my bedside table long after it died; it is, in fact, still there. When I knew it was dying, It hurt me to know that my cactus wouldn't make it another season, but throwing it out meant risking the chance that it might turn green again. I thought that keeping the dead cactus would remind me of its once green state. Instead, it mocks me and it pokes me and it reminds me that everything starts with the intentions of ending.