i awaken to the scent of rain on asphalt—
not Tokyo rain, not London rain,
but this rain, here, now,
falling on a city that holds me
the way a stranger holds your gaze
on the train: briefly, then looks away.

わたし is a word i learned to whisper
before i knew what it meant to say I.
the shape of self depends on who is listening.
in English, i stands alone, a pillar.
in Japanese, わたし bows slightly,
aware of the room it takes up.

last night i dreamed in subtitles—
my mother's voice in one language,
my response in another.
when i woke, my mouth was dry,
as if i'd been translating all night,
as if sleep were just another border crossing.

---

the woman at the convenience store
knows my order by heart:
onigiri, salmon. black coffee, no sugar.
we exchange the same words every morning,
a small ritual that asks nothing of me
except that i show up.

yesterday she smiled and said kiwotsukete—
take care—and i felt it,
that gentle weight of being seen,
not as a customer or a foreigner,
but as a person who might need reminding
that someone notices when i leave.

i think about the languages we speak
without opening our mouths:
the tilt of a head, the hesitation
before a door closes,
the way a hand lingers on a railing
as if steadying more than the body.

---

my phone autocorrects home to ホーム—
platform, station, the place you wait
for something to arrive and take you elsewhere.
maybe that's all home ever was:
a platform between departures,
a breath held between translations.

tonight the city hums with neon and distance.
i walk past windows glowing with lives
i'll never enter, languages i'll never speak fluently.
and somewhere between the fluorescent aisles
and the warm rectangle of my apartment,
i find a rhythm that belongs to no one else—

this pulse, this stride, this particular way
of carrying myself through the world,
neither here nor there,
but here. now. enough.

#poetry #identity #belonging #bilingual