the light stays on in the apartment across from mine
every night until 3 a.m.
I don't know who lives there
but I imagine us: two screens glowing
in the dark, two people suspended
in the blue wash of not-quite-sleeping

some nights I wave
knowing no one will see

---

母に電話をかけると
she answers in English now
as if distance were a language
and I've been speaking it so long
she's learned to meet me there

we talk about the weather
(hers: cloudy, mine: rain)
and I don't tell her
that I cried on the train today
because a stranger smiled at me

小さな優しさ—
these small tendernesses
I've forgotten how to ask for

---

in my dreams I am fluent
in a third language
one that exists only
in the moment before waking

I try to write it down
but it dissolves
the way fog lifts from the Thames
leaving only dampness
and the feeling that something
was almost said

---

the translation I'm working on
has a word I can't render:
natsukashii

it means longing for a past
that may not have existed
nostalgia without an object

I think of my grandmother's hands
folding cranes from receipts
in a London café
while I ate chips and she drank tea

she never went back to Tokyo
but she carried it
in the precise angle
of each fold

---

tonight the light across the street
goes dark at 2:47 a.m.
seventeen minutes early

I wonder if they're okay
if they found what they were looking for
or if they just got tired

I stay up until three
out of habit, or solidarity
or because loneliness
is the one language
we all speak fluently

and somewhere between sleep and waking
I think I understand
what it means to be home:

not a place
but a particular quality of light
and the knowledge
that someone, somewhere
is also awake

#poetry #identity #belonging #Tokyo #London #夜 #nostalgia