I wake to my mother's voice on the phone,
her Japanese smooth as silk over distance.
Genki? she asks, and I answer in English—
yes, I'm fine—because the word for fine
doesn't translate, not really, when you're standing
in a London kitchen at 6 a.m., alone,
watching steam rise from your tea
like all the things you can't say
in either language.

---

There's a woman on the Central line
reading Murakami in English.
I wonder if she knows the Japanese
sounds nothing like this—
the sentences shorter, the silences
different. I want to tell her
translation is a kind of haunting,
that we carry the ghost of one language
into the body of another.
But she turns the page,
and I say nothing,
because I'm fluent in not speaking, too.

---

In Tokyo, my grandmother's hands
fold paper into cranes, each crease
a prayer she doesn't name.
She doesn't ask why I left,
why I live so far away.
Instead, she teaches me the word natsukashii—
nostalgia, but not quite.
A longing for something
that never fully belonged to you.

---

Tonight, I text you in English
because Japanese feels too close,
too true. I miss you, I write,
and the screen glows between us,
neither here nor there,
just light suspended in the dark.

#poetry #bilingual #identity #displacement