I wake to messages in three time zones—
my mother's voice memo from Shibuya at dawn,
a friend's breakup text from Brooklyn at midnight,
the landlord's email about the leak, timestamped
while I slept. I exist in the gaps
between their clocks, a body
that answers to no single sun.
Tadaima, I say to an empty flat.
No one answers okaeri.
The translator's curse: to live
always in the space between what was said
and what was meant. Today I spent two hours
searching for the English word for natsukashii—
that ache of memory tinged with sweetness,
like biting into a fruit you haven't tasted
since childhood. Nostalgia is too heavy,
wistful too light. Some feelings
have no passport.
At the convenience store, the cashier
speaks to me in slow, careful English.
I answer in Japanese. He switches.
I switch back. We perform this dance
until one of us gives up. Later,
I'll forget which language I dreamed in.
*
On the train platform, a woman
drops her phone. The screen
doesn't crack—we both exhale,
two strangers complicit in relief.
She smiles. I smile. We don't speak.
This is also a kind of translation:
the grammar of glances, the syntax
of small mercies. How we carry
each other's almost-disasters
for the length of a commute,
then forget.
I think of my grandmother, who never
learned to read English but could identify
every flower in Kew Gardens by name.
Bara, she'd say, pointing. Rose.
As if the word in her mouth
could make it bloom twice.
Tonight I'll lie awake, listening
to the couple upstairs arguing
in a language I don't recognize.
I'll understand everything.
#poetry #identity #belonging #language