I watch my mother's hands
fold paper cranes at the kitchen table
in Ealing, West London,
each crease a word she can't say
in English. She hums a melody
from Yokohama, 1970-something,
and I think: this is what it means
to live translated—
every gesture a gloss,
every silence annotated.

---

The District line at 6 AM
still smells like last night's bodies.
A man sleeps against the window,
his breath fogging the glass.
I want to tell him: daijoubu,
you're not the only one
drifting between stations,
mistaking motion for arrival.

In Tokyo, they have a word: ma—
the space between things,
the pause that holds meaning.
Here, we just call it waiting.

---

My grandmother sends voice messages
I play at half-speed to understand.
She asks if I'm eating enough rice,
if the air is cold,
if I remember the shape of her garden.
I lie in both languages.

---

Some mornings I wake up
and don't know which self
slept in this bed.
The one who dreams in hiragana,
or the one who thinks in Underground maps.

There's a third self, maybe,
who speaks in line breaks—
who knows that home
is not a place
but the syntax of return:
conditional, subjunctive,
never quite present tense.

#poetry #identity #belonging #bilingual