Love is everywhere
Love is the most common thing
Right next to seasonal flu
Allergy and worn out shoes, loud horns and rusted screws
It’s everywhere- would I say a pandemic? No an endemic to humanity
If I said this in front of you, you would’ve scrunched up your nose
Looked slightly above your glasses and said
There you go again-
Your cynicism and strange views
Hopeless ideas and tired blues
Love is not some common commodity
Not just some ordinary feat
But we walk bout the corridors
Arguing on semantics and words
While love passes by, like spring breeze
The most common thing in the world
15 missed calls from my mother
From a faraway town by the sea
Always the same question, the same bother
: have you eaten today?
I console her 15 times
And for the hundredth times
She sighs relief,
With a few quips she feels
Cuts the call
and sits to eat
The most common thing in the world
Every leaf of Neem falling by the road,
Carelessly, in abundance
Is my fathers love,
Who digged out a neem sapling for me from a bush
Because I cried that it would die
My own love,
My grandma who I promised at 9, id build a swing for her
If the neem tree survived
It didn’t,
With age -neither did her memories
But with each fallen leaves, ones I stash in my bags and my pockets
Are mementos
Of the most common thing, the most common truth
That he’d wait the line
And know to put exactly two spoons of sugar
In the cup for his friend with tired eyes
She writes “A” the same way
As her kindergarten teacher
Who knew her smile with tooth gaps
And held her hand when she cried
Love is the most common confession
We tell without knowing
I wait by the prayer hall
You hear my favorite songs
The cat that always falls asleep right between your legs
The ring that’s rusted on my finger
From a cherished old friend
The most common sight
Our most honest truth
Love is everywhere we are
If you’d just remember where to look.
Kishoar Tahia Mazumder Aabha is a Bio student who is trying to find out if the old legend of fern spores being invisibility spells is true or not to avoid social interactions. She is a Freshman majoring in the Biotechnology program from the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Brac University.
