October 24, 2026

The woman across from me is sleeping
with her cheek pressed to the cold window,
her reflection superimposed on Bermondsey,
on the grey water under London Bridge —
two of her, both exhausted,
both going somewhere.

I think of a word in Japanese
that has no English counterpart,
the way 木漏れ日 — komorebi —
holds the light falling through leaves
in a single breath,
and how I have spent years
looking for its equivalent
in a city that mostly hides its trees.

When I translate, I am always losing something.
A shade of meaning. A temperature.
The sound a word makes
when it settles in the mouth
of someone who grew up with it.

In Tokyo I am the one who pauses,
who reaches for the phrase like a key
that almost fits the lock.
Here I am fluent and still
a little foreign to myself,
watching my own gestures
as if from a slight distance.

The woman wakes up at Waterloo,
gathers herself — coat, bag, the careful reassembly
of a person —
and steps off without looking back.

I want to write her a poem
in a language she hasn't learned yet,
one that lives between the languages I know,
in that particular silence
where translation fails
and something true
is finally said.

---

What I Know About Home

It is not a place.

It is the hour after midnight
when I find the right word
for what I've been trying to say all year,
and I say it quietly, alone,
in both languages at once,
and neither feels like lying.

#poetry #identity #belonging #translation