I wake to the sound of a language
I learned before I learned to lie.
My mother's voice, rising through floorboards,
speaking to no one I can see.

Moshi moshi. Hello across an ocean
of sleep, of years, of distance measured
in subway stops I'll never take again.

In London, I count the hours backward.
In Tokyo, I count them forward.
Somewhere between the two
I lose track of which direction
home is supposed to be.

---

The translator's apartment is small.
Two rooms. One language per room, I joke
to friends who don't quite laugh.
But it's true—I keep English in the kitchen,
Japanese in the bedroom where I dream.

Sometimes they bleed together.
I'll say natsukashii when asked
how I'm feeling about a song,
and watch the confusion bloom
across a face I thought I knew.

There is no English word for natsukashii.
Nostalgia comes close, but misses
the ache of it, the sweet rot
of memory against the tongue.

I am fluent in this missing.
The gaps between what I mean
and what I'm able to say.
The silence where one language ends
before the other begins.

---

On the train tonight, a child
speaks to her mother in a language
I almost recognize. Not the words,
but the cadence of it. The way
she switches mid-sentence,
reaching for whichever word
arrives first.

I want to tell her: You will spend
your whole life doing this.
Reaching. Switching. Losing
the word you need in the language
you're supposed to be speaking.

But she is six, maybe seven.
She doesn't need to know yet
that fluency is also a kind of loneliness.

That sometimes you will dream in a language
you can't speak when you wake.

#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging