The train window reflects my face back at me,
double-exposed over Shibuya crossing,
and I can't tell which version is more real—
the one moving through the city
or the one the city moves through.

In the translator's office, I turn
loneliness into 孤独 and back again,
as if the gap between them
were just a matter of shifting letters,
not an ocean, not a childhood,
not the particular ache of standing
in your mother's kitchen
speaking her language
with your father's mouth.

Someone texted: where are you from?
I start typing Tokyo, delete it,
type London, delete it,
leave them on read for three days.

The truth is I'm from the 6 a.m. convenience store,
fluorescent white and humming,
where I buy the same onigiri every morning
and the clerk never asks my name.
I'm from the English rain that sounds different
from Japanese rain on the same red umbrella.
I'm from the split second between languages
where a word exists in neither
and I am fluent in nothing.

My ex used to say I was hard to reach.
I think she meant I was always translating myself,
even in bed, even when her hand
found the small of my back in the dark.
How do you say I love you
when love is a word you learned twice
and meant differently both times?

Belonging has no good translation.
It fractures in my mouth:
zokusuru—to belong to, to be possessed by,
ibasho—a place to be, to exist.

I want the latter. I think.
A place where I am not constantly rendered,
not turned from one alphabet to another,
where my face in the window
is just my face,
singular, still, enough.

But tonight, walking home through Sangenjaya,
I catch myself thinking in three languages at once—
English grammar, Japanese particles, the universal syntax of exhaustion—
and maybe this is it.
Maybe home is not a translation
but the accumulated errors,
the residue that won't convert,
the word that keeps both meanings
and belongs to neither language
but to me.

#poetry #identity #translation #belonging