Our first meeting was inside a closet.
Incidentally, so was our first year together.

Our first meeting was difficult.
We were like two tiny existentialists
Fighting for the most valuable resource of our times.

Space.

The darkness beyond the closeted door
Belonged to her. She had stayed there
Before I arrived and opened the door.
She wouldn’t share her darkness with me.
She fought like a wild animal. Following
The two most important things in the closet –
The animal instinct. And shadows
Darker than the darkness. And hence, glowing.
Her strength and her pace drew me to her.
I fought back.

We fought for many days. Continuously.
And then, like it happens with all fights,
We forgot why we fought.
The reason fell short of perpetuating forever.
And our fight went beyond the boundaries of reason.
Slowly, we came to realize that the fight
Had become something we looked forward to.
An excuse to each other’s company.

We knew each other by the smell of sweat.
And touch. We fought for that touch.
Our expressions of the darkly interact had changed.
I had become more violent.
She was forgiving.
And we had started seeing in the dark.

That’s when we noticed the plant in the closet.
It was a tiny herb. A budding shoot.
But it was a great thing to notice.
It meant there was earth in the closet.
We decided to plow the earth properly
So that there might be more plants.
More lives.

The closet made more space for us.
It grew taller and wider.
Went beyond the walls of the solitary room.
That contained it. Or rather, didn’t contain it any further.
And we lived tending out pet plants.

The closet grew beyond the roof. Up into the skies.
And so, we realized one of our plants was Jack’s beanstalk
And that there were giants above the clouds.
They waited for us to surge upwards.
Raise our fists in glory. Or revolt.

That’s exactly where our closeted lives end.
With all of us. And don’t we know
They feast on our fist up there?