in the airport lounge at 3am
I watch a man sleep with his head on his carry-on,
mouth open, trusting strangers
not to steal his dreams.

yasashii, I think—
but there's no English word that sits right,
no synonym soft enough
to hold what I mean.

I've been carrying dictionaries my whole life,
switching tongues mid-sentence,
apologizing in the wrong language,
feeling foreign in both.

My mother says okaeri
but I'm never sure where I've returned from.
My father texts in English
with Japanese punctuation。

---

the train window holds two cities—
one rushing past in neon,
one reflected, ghostly, where I sit
watching myself disappear.

I used to think belonging meant
choosing one reflection over the other.
Now I think it means learning
to live between the glass,

half-visible,
half-passenger,
fluent in neither language
but native to the hyphen.

At Shibuya crossing I count
a thousand people crossing
a thousand other people
and no one colliding.

We've learned the choreography
of moving through each other
like water, like breath—
intimate strangers

who will never speak,
never touch,
but for one moment
we are the same body.

I think of the word ma—
the pause between heartbeats,
the space that makes the music.

Maybe home is not a place
but the gap between places,
the silence between languages
where I am finally fluent.

---

tonight in my studio apartment
where the walls are thin enough
to hear my neighbor's television dreams,
I write a poem in English,

translate it into Japanese,
then back again—
and what returns
is almost the same,

almost mine,
almost what I meant to say
before language
made its choices for me.

The difference between the two
is where I live—
in the almost,
in the between.

#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging