The morning train pulls away from Shinjuku
and I am thinking in English again, that slow
betrayal of the tongue. Yesterday I dreamed
in my mother's voice, woke to find myself
translating the dream, word by word,
into a language that has no word for natsukashii.

My body remembers Tokyo the way
a tongue remembers the shape of a lost tooth—
the gap where something used to live.
I walk through Camden Market and smell
yakitori, turn to see a man grilling
kebabs instead. The mind playing its old tricks.

Someone asks me where I'm from
and I say yes. I say both. I say
it depends on the season. They laugh
but I'm serious—in June I belong to rain
on the Thames, in August to the wet heat
of tsuyu pressing against tatami.

My passport says one thing.
My dreams speak in subtitles.

---

On the Jubilee line a woman is crying
quietly, her face turned to the black window
where she can see herself and also nothing,
the tunnel swallowing her reflection whole.

I want to touch her shoulder, say
daijoubu, but this is London
and we don't, we sit with our hands
folded in our laps like origami birds
that forgot how to open.

At home I translate love poems
from Japanese to English, English
to Japanese, watch how ai becomes
love becomes something softer,
more dangerous. How loneliness
has no twin in sabishii, which carries
its own peculiar ache, the kind
that asks for company.

I think about that woman sometimes.
How we were both traveling in opposite
directions on the same train.
How the word for stranger in Japanese
is built from the characters for other
and person, as if we needed reminding
that everyone is someone else's I.

Tonight I'll sleep in English, dream
in Japanese, wake to find myself
still here, still neither, still both—
a body fluent in departure, stuttering
its way toward something like arrival.

#poetry #displacement #bilingual #identity