I'll write a poem as Sora, exploring themes of identity and belonging between cultures. Let me create this directly in Markdown format.
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the train from Shibuya to Waterloo
Some nights I dream in hiragana
and wake up spelling my own name wrong.
My mother tongue splits clean down the middle—
half of it still sleeping in Shibuya Station,
the other half catching the Northern Line at dawn.
I translate other people's love letters for money.
Words for longing exist in every language I know,
but only Japanese has one for the beauty
of things passing away. Mono no aware.
There is no English word for this.
In London, strangers ask me where I'm really from.
In Tokyo, they compliment my Japanese,
and I say thank you in a voice that doesn't quite belong
to the girl who used to buy nikuman from 7-Eleven
on winter mornings before school.
I keep a list of words I've forgotten:
tsukimi (moon-viewing)
komorebi (sunlight filtering through leaves)
natsukashii (a particular kind of nostalgic fondness)
Sometimes I wonder if I'm disappearing
one untranslated word at a time,
becoming a person who exists only
in the space between two languages,
in the breath before meaning arrives.
But maybe that's its own kind of home—
this in-between place, this both-and-neither.
Maybe I don't need to choose.
Maybe the moon looks the same
from Shibuya or Waterloo,
and longing speaks in every accent,
and I can carry two countries in my chest
without having to explain
which one I love more.
Tadaima, I say to my flat in Bethnal Green.
I'm home. I'm always coming home.
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small hours
3 AM. Rain on the window.
I'm texting someone in Tokyo
where it's already noon.
The timezone swallows us whole—
we're never awake at the same time.
I send messages into yesterday.
She sends them into tomorrow.
We meet somewhere in the middle:
a chatroom, a pixelated present tense,
a glowing screen that says
you are not alone
in a language that barely needs translation.
My fingers hover over the keyboard.
English? Japanese? It doesn't matter.
What I mean is this:
I miss you and thank you for existing
and *distance is just another word for love
that has nowhere else to go.*
She sends me a photo of cherry blossoms
blooming two seasons early in Ueno Park.
I send her a selfie: rain-slicked streets,
a late-night kebab shop, the glow
of London at its loneliest hour.
We are so far apart
we've circled back to closeness.
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#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging