The train stops between stations.
No announcement. Just the sudden
absence of motion, the fluorescent hum
filling the space where momentum was.

I check my phone—no signal here either.
A woman across from me closes her book,
looks up at nothing in particular.
We are all waiting for the same thing
in different languages.

Ma, the Japanese call it—
the pause between breaths,
the room a word needs to live in.
But this is different. This is
the elevator pitch of anxiety,
the buffering wheel of my chest.

When I translate, I live
in the space between what was said
and what can be said. Some words
have no doubles. Komorebi—
sunlight filtering through leaves.
There's no English for that specific gold,
that particular way of being seen through.

Homesick exists in Japanese
but it's someone else's mouth shaping it:
hōmusikku. The borrowed word
sounds like a diagnosis.

---

Last night I dreamed in subtitles.
My mother spoke and I read her words
at the bottom of my vision, white text
on a black bar. I woke up uncertain
which language she'd actually used.

At the convenience store, I say
arigato to the cashier who answered
in English. Small failures of belonging,
these minor miscalculations of self.

I think of Naomi Shihab Nye writing,
*Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.*

But what if you know displacement
as the deepest thing? Not sorrow, not kindness—
just the chronic awareness of standing
with one foot in the door, holding it open,
afraid to choose a room.

The train starts again without warning.
We lurch forward. The woman
reopens her book mid-sentence,
finds her place, continues.

#poetry #identity #displacement #bilingual