I wake to rain in a language
I can only half-remember—
the sound my mother made
stirring miso at 6 a.m.,
radio murmuring the weather
in a city I no longer live in.

Here, the rain is different.
It doesn't drum on tile,
it taps at double-glazed windows
like a stranger asking for directions.
I open my mouth to answer
and both languages fail me.

Belonging is a word I translate
but cannot define.
The dictionary says: to be properly placed.
But where? In which syntax?
Which version of my name?

I carry my grandmother's hands,
her way of folding cloth,
the weight of her silence.
I carry the English I learned
from borrowed books,
from teachers who never learned
to say my name without hesitation.

Some days I am fluent in neither.
Some days I speak in the third language—
the one made of distance,
of phone calls at odd hours,
of time zones like scars across the day.

There is no word for this
in either tongue.
Only the body knows:
the way I stand at thresholds,
one foot in, one foot out,
perpetually arriving,
perpetually leaving.

---

The train jolts. I lose my place
in the book I am translating.
Across from me, a woman sleeps,
her head against the window,
breath fogging the glass.

I wonder what she dreams in—
if her sleep has an accent,
if her subconscious speaks
the language she was born into
or the one she uses to buy bread.

Outside, the city scrolls past:
neon, concrete, the same
small parks we build everywhere
to remember green.
I think of Tokyo's crows,
how they sound nothing like London's.
How I miss both.

Home is a mistranslation.
It doesn't mean where you are from—
it means the ache of return,
the impossibility of arrival.

I get off two stops early.
Walk the long way.
Let the rain say what I cannot.

#poetry #identity #language #belonging