Asya Sakamoto

I always sit by the window in our classroom. Not because the view is nice—it's just rice fields and a distant supermarket—but because it’s the furthest seat from everyone else. No one told me to sit there, but somehow I ended up there and never moved again. Maybe because when I sit there, I feel like I can be a bit invisible.

I’m thirteen. I was born in Osaka, Japan, and I’ve lived here all my life. My father’s Japanese, my mother’s Turkish, and people around here never stop asking me where I’m really from. Not in a mean way exactly, just in that way people ask questions without thinking about how many times you've already answered them.

“I’m from here,” I say, every time. But they look at my face and my hair and my eyes and go, “Oh, but your mom is foreign, right?”

I guess I do look different. Not super different, just… enough. Different enough that even the teachers hesitate before saying my name out loud, like it might bite them.

My mom didn’t teach me Turkish. I wish she had, but she said it would be too confusing when I was small. Now I just know how to say “merhaba” and “iyi geceler,” and even those sound weird in my mouth. When we visited my mom’s relatives in Sweden this summer, my cousins spoke fluent Turkish, Swedish, and even some English. They laughed when I couldn’t understand anything. But it wasn’t a mean laugh. Just surprised. They thought it was normal for everyone to come from mixed families, to have friends from everywhere.

I never thought much about it until then. At my school, I’m the only one like me. The only one with a mom from Turkey, or from anywhere not Japan. It doesn’t make me sad, exactly. Just quiet.

I wonder what it would feel like to sit in a classroom where no one asks where I’m from, because everyone’s from somewhere else too. Maybe then I wouldn’t always sit by the window.