March 22, 2026

The train announcements switch languages at Shinjuku—
tsugi wa, next station, tsugi wa—
and I am fluent in neither arrival nor departure,
only the space between the doors opening.

My mother's voice on the phone asks
genki? and I say yes in English,
which is also a lie, or a translation,
or both.

Yesterday I rewrote the same sentence seven times:
the light through the window
窓からの光
hikari streaming through the mado—
none of them were right.
None of them were home.

In London, they ask where I'm from.
In Tokyo, they ask where I'm from.
I have learned to say everywhere with a smile
that closes like a parenthesis.

*

At the konbini at 2 a.m., the cashier and I
perform our transaction in polite silence,
the receipt a small contract between strangers.

Outside, a salaryman sleeps against the vending machines,
his breathing steady as the hum of refrigeration.
I think about waking him. I don't.

This, too, is a kind of tenderness:
knowing when to leave someone
to their own small peace.

I walk home through streets named after things
that no longer exist—rice paddies, old families, shrines
demolished for convenience stores.

My phone glows with messages from a timezone
where people I love are eating breakfast.
Here, it is the hour of no hour,
when the city forgets to perform itself.

I write back: I miss you.
The characters hover, unsent,
because I don't know which language
makes it true.

At home, I sit by the window.
The neighbor's air conditioner drips
a steady rhythm onto the concrete below—
tsugi wa, next is, tsugi wa—

I am fluent in this:
the dialect of waiting,
the grammar of almost-belonging,
the syntax of two spaces
held in one body.

#poetry #identity #Tokyo #belonging #translation