There is something quietly radical about walking up to a stranger at a bus station and asking her when she first knew she was in love. That is exactly where poet Deborah Akhigbe begins, and the stranger she finds there does not shut her down. She looks back with eyes smiling with pride and offers up the kind of story that only a truly connected heart could carry.
Akhigbe captures something most of us recognize but rarely say out loud: that love announces itself differently to every person who has ever felt it, and that sometimes the most honest conversations about it happen between people who have never met before.
The poem leaves a quiet question hanging in the air, one that the title itself is already asking. Is this also love? We are left to sit with that, long after the stranger at the bus station has gone.
Originally published by Brittle Paper.