Wrong, again.
Two young plants are growing. One is a strawberry and the other a tomato. They don’t know each other. They’ve never met before. Same age, more or less, maybe only three months old. I don’t know how that translates into our human years. I know one human year equals seven dog years, but I have no idea about tomatoes and strawberries.
Anyway, I placed them close to each other just like that. I know nothing about plants. I don’t know what they need and what they don’t. I don’t even know why I moved them closer together there, beneath the window. Maybe so they’d get more sun. Probably that. In any case, they’ve been together for a few weeks now.
I noticed something around seven days ago. At first, I thought I was imagining it, romanticising things, but no, it’s really happening. The strawberry’s leaves started reaching towards the tomato’s leaves. As if they wanted to touch, to meet each other. Each of them lives isolated in its own pot. Maybe they’re lonely? They probably are. What I saw touched me deeply. That slow movement, that touch in the making, carried something very tender and beautiful and sad inside it.
That means they were lonely, those two plants. They still are. That’s why they want to touch, just like all of us living things. In my version of this love story, Tomato is male, and Strawberry is female. It’s not important, but that’s just how I automatically imagined it. For me, that was how it was.
Anyway, I helped them touch. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist. Soon I’ll place them in the same soil. Let their roots touch too and keep each other company. That’s how they communicate, I read somewhere.
After some time spent romanticising the love between Tomato and Strawberry, a man who has worked with plants for years told me that Strawberry had actually attacked Tomato because that’s simply the kind of plant it is. It’s always searching for new fertile ground because it wants to spread, and in truth, Strawberry doesn’t give a pip about Tomato.
“And Tomato? What does he think?” I asked, disappointed.
“Tomato? Well, you see, he loves Carrot, and Carrot loves Onion, so there you go...”
I was horrified by this revelation.
“Well, that’s even worse than us humans. Everyone falls in love with the wrong ones. Is that really possible?” I asked, desperate and sad.
The plant expert just shrugged and walked into my shed to fetch a small rake. Since he was gone for quite a while, I decided to go see what was taking him so long, and so I went.
When I entered the shed, I saw him crying. I hugged him and started crying with him. After some time spent crying together, I asked him why he was crying.
He told me he had bet on some football club, put almost his entire pension on the match, and the club lost, and now he didn’t know how to tell his wife.
I thought he was crying because of all the wrong people falling in love with each other or something much more romantic than that, but there you go, I was wrong again. Again!
Boring…