The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete by Sakina Jabrayilova

The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete

There are some evenings that never really leave you.
They sit quietly inside ordinary things —
inside the smell of wet pavement,
inside the flicker of a streetlamp,
inside songs you stopped listening to years ago because they knew too much.

I still remember the supermarket near our apartment,
how automatic doors opened like tired sighs,
how fluorescent lights turned everyone pale and distant.
My mother would compare prices in silence while I wandered toward the candy aisle,
believing adulthood was something glamorous and impossibly far away.

Now I stand in similar supermarkets alone,
holding bread and shampoo and batteries,
and suddenly I am mourning a version of myself
that did not yet know how quickly life could collapse into routine.

Back then, evenings felt enormous.
The future was a glowing city somewhere beyond the horizon.
I thought there would always be time —
time to become beautiful enough,
talented enough,
important enough
to outrun the quiet fear growing in me.

But nostalgia is strange.
It does not miss the truth.
It misses the lighting.

It turns old bedrooms into sacred places.
It softens arguments heard through thin walls.
It wraps loneliness in gold ribbon
until even sadness begins to look cinematic.

Sometimes I wish I could walk back into one of those forgotten evenings
hear the television humming from another room,
feel rainwater soaking the edges of my shoes,
watch the city glow through fogged car windows
without knowing anything about grief or time or failure.

Just for five minutes.

Just long enough to believe again
that life was still about to begin.

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Sakina Jabrayilova is an emerging writer from Azerbaijan drawn to themes of nostalgia, quiet longing, and the emotional textures of everyday life. ‘The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete’ is her first published poem.