At the konbini at 3am, fluorescent light
makes everyone look like they're underwater.
The clerk says irasshaimase to no one,
to the hum of refrigerators, to me
sliding coins across the counter
for a rice ball I will eat standing up
in the parking lot, watching taxis
idle at the red light that stays red
longer than it needs to.

My mother texts in romaji because
her phone doesn't have Japanese input.
Genki? she asks, and I taste
the shape of that question in my mouth—
the way some words only live
in one language. I could say fine
or I could say まあまあ which means
fine but also means the space between
fine and not fine, the shrug of a shoulder,
the small grief of being neither here nor there.

In London, people asked where I was from.
In Tokyo, they ask where I'm from.
The difference is in the tense.
I've learned to translate myself
into whichever shape the room requires—
but at night, alone, I forget which version
is the original. My dreams code-switch mid-sentence.
I wake up with words in my mouth
that belong to no one.

 

There's a word in Japanese: natsukashii—
that ache for something beloved and lost.
But what do you call the feeling
for something you never had?
A belonging you only imagined,
a home in a language that doesn't quite fit,
a self you were supposed to become
but missed the train for.

I translate other people's words for a living.
I make one language speak in the clothes of another.
But some nights I think: what if I am
the thing that's lost in translation?
What if I am the footnote, the asterisk,
the phrase marked no equivalent exists?

Still—I keep looking.
In the way light holds the rain.
In the small mercy of a warm train seat.
In the woman at the convenience store
who remembers I don't need a bag.

Maybe home isn't a place.
Maybe it's the moment you stop translating yourself,
even for a breath.
Maybe it's this: standing in a parking lot at 3am,
rice ball in hand, belonging to nothing
but the night, the sodium lights, the hum
of a city that never asked me to explain.

#poetry #identity #language #displacement