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I. Commute This morning the Tube swallowed me whole — District line, westbound,
On the Yamanote Line, 11 p.m., I count the stations by their sound— Yūrakuchō, Shimbashi,...
The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷— longing for hometown, the kanji say, two characters...
Someone asks me where I'm from and I say the Piccadilly Line between Earl's Court and Hammersmith,
The train doors close before I finish the sentence I was forming in my head— English or Japanese, I...
Someone asked me today what language I dream in.
I said: both, and neither,
and they nodded like they understood
but their eyes were already moving
toward the window.
---
On the Tube this morning,
a woman counted her stops
in a whisper I recognized —
the shape of numbers leaving the mouth
the way water finds the lowest place.
We did not speak.
We held our separate silences
like the particular quiet
of two people
who have both been somewhere
they can't explain.
---
I keep a notebook of untranslatable words.
Natsukashii. The ache of something
you can only miss once it's already gone.
Saudade. The Portuguese taught me longing
has a country of its own.
I am collecting passports
for places that don't exist on maps.
---
At 3 a.m. in my kitchen,
I eat leftover rice the way my grandmother taught me —
slowly, standing,
holding the bowl close to my chest
like a small warm thing
that might run.
Outside, London hums its bureaucratic hum.
Inside, I am briefly
from somewhere.
---
The translator's confession:
every word I carry across
leaves a little of itself behind —
a residue, a ghost,
the smell of the original room.
Some nights I think I am only
what has been lost between languages,
the space where meaning hesitates
before it lands.
それでも言葉は来る。
Still, the words come.
#poetry #identity #language #belonging
