The train doors close and I am neither
here nor there, suspended between
Shibuya and Shinjuku, watching
my reflection split across the glass—
half in the tunnel's dark, half
in the fluorescent now.

Itte kimasu, I said this morning
to an empty apartment. The words
hung in the air like laundry
I forgot to bring in before rain.

There is no word in English
for the way light looks
on wet asphalt at 6 PM,
no word in Japanese
for the specific loneliness
of understanding everything
and belonging nowhere.

*

My mother texts in romaji
because her phone is old.
Genki? she asks, and I write back
I'm fine in English, this
untranslatable fine that means
I'm holding on, I'm tired,
I'm learning how to be alone
in two languages at once.

*

At the konbini, the clerk says
thank you in English when I pay.
I say arigatou back.
We are both performing
a small theater of elsewhere,
two people trading
the words we think
the other wants to hear.

Later, I will translate
a poem about cherry blossoms
and write "cherry blossoms"
knowing it cannot hold
the weight of sakura—
that specific pink, that
particular ephemerality,
the way an entire country
stops to watch things
fall and fall and fall.

*

Tonight I cook pasta
with miso. My grandmother
would not understand this.
My London friends would call it
fusion. I call it dinner.
I call it eating alone
on a Monday, making do
with what the body needs:
salt, warmth, the small mercy
of feeding yourself
when no one else will.

The water boils. The noodles
soften. I am learning
that home is not a place
you find but a grammar
you conjugate daily—
*I am here, I was there,
I will have been
somewhere in between.*

#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging