Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo had come to this land as an outsider, choosing the Dojo's crooked gates over any homeland that ever claimed him, and he wore his foreign eyes like a badge no one asked for. In the bamboo forest, on a watch shift he'd sworn to keep sober, he found himself talking to the only fool desperate enough to listen, which turned out to be himself, whispering back through the green stalks like an old ronin haunting his own ghost. Dignity slipped out of him somewhere between the third slurred confession and the joint he lit to steady his nerves, and by the time the wind rattled the bamboo like laughing bones, he'd lost the thread of whatever wisdom he thought he was chasing. He called the whole exchange uninspiring, the way a man calls a lost bet unlucky instead of admitting he never had the discipline to walk away. Still he stood guard the next night, blade sharp, resolve dull, loyal to a post he could no longer explain even to the version of himself hiding in the leaves.