I sleep in a city where every train arrives
exactly on time—
except the one I'm on,
which stops between stations,
fluorescent lights stuttering
like my mother's voice on a long-distance call.

Moshi moshi?
Sometimes I forget which language
I was dreaming in.

---

At the konbini at 3am,
a girl counts coins with chipped nail polish.
I buy milk I won't drink
just to hear her say arigatou gozaimasu—
that soft formal distance
more intimate than touching.

Outside, the vending machines hum
their electric lullabies.
I think: this is also a kind of belonging.

---

You asked me once what home sounds like.
I said: the pause between words
when you can't find the right one
in any language you know.

The way natsukashii means nostalgic
but carries the weight of seasons
and childhood and lost things—
how English makes me explain
what Japanese lets me feel.

Home is the translation I never finish.

---

In London, they ask where I'm really from.
In Tokyo, they compliment my Japanese
like a visitor who studied hard.

I've learned to live
in the margins of dictionaries,
the footnotes explaining idioms
that lose their warmth
in transfer.

But here's what no one tells you:
sometimes the in-between
is its own country.
Population: one.
Language: yours alone.

---

This morning I watched a woman on the platform
adjust her child's backpack,
smooth his hair,
and the tenderness was so ordinary
it hurt.

I wanted to write it down
but couldn't choose the language—
couldn't decide which words
would hold the weight of it:
the small corrections we make
to keep each other safe
in a world of precise departures.

So I stood there, silent,
in the space between saying and seeing,
which is maybe where all poems begin.

#poetry #identity #language #belonging