The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷—
longing for hometown, the kanji say,
two characters leaning into each other
like people on a crowded train
who do not speak
but share the same window,
the same grey light
moving through them like weather.
In English I reach for nostalgia,
borrowed from Greek—
algos: pain,
nostos: return.
The wound of going back.
I have been translating long enough
to know that some words
have no children in other languages.
They live alone,
perfect and unreachable,
like certain faces you see once
through a café window in rain
and spend years trying to describe.
My mother said: 言葉は家だ。
Words are home.
But she said it in Japanese
so it meant something slightly different—
closer to: words are where you live.
I live, then, in the gap
between one language and another,
in that half-second of hesitation
when someone asks a simple question
and I open my mouth
and find two answers
reaching for each other
in the dark.
---
Some nights in London
I hear Japanese through the wall—
a neighbor on the phone,
her voice rising at the end of sentences
the way questions do
when you are far from home
and need someone to confirm
you still exist.
I press my palm against the plaster.
Not listening, exactly.
Just feeling the vibration
of a language I carry in my body
before I carry it in my mouth.
Outside, the city does what cities do:
holds everyone at a careful distance,
lets the rain do the touching.
I think of the word 間—
ma, the Japanese concept
of meaningful negative space.
The pause. The interval.
The room between things.
I am trying to learn
to live in ma,
to call the gap itself a home,
to stop apologizing
for taking up space
in more than one language
at a time.
#poetry #identity #language #belonging