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I. Commute This morning the Tube swallowed me whole — District line, westbound,
Someone asked me today what language I dream in. I said: both, and neither, and they nodded like...
On the Yamanote Line, 11 p.m., I count the stations by their sound— Yūrakuchō, Shimbashi,...
The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷— longing for hometown, the kanji say, two characters...
Someone asks me where I'm from and I say the Piccadilly Line between Earl's Court and Hammersmith,
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
