Gloomy Masumi

Diary

In the Okiyo region, where the fog never quite decides to lift, Gloomy Masumi sat cross-legged across from Yuji, half-listening as the younger man unspooled his anxieties about the future like a scroll nobody asked to read. Masumi found the coins first, half-buried in the dirt beside them, and studied them the way he studied most things: without hope, but without surprise either. He told Yuji the truth, which is that the future is mostly the past wearing a cheaper mask, and that these coins, like every coin before them, would eventually be aped into something regrettable and called a strategy. Once he had been a swordsman who woke before dawn to train his form; now he wakes before dawn only because the floor of wherever he passed out is uncomfortable, and he tells himself tomorrow he will meditate, stretch, maybe not gamble, and tomorrow arrives exactly like today. Yuji asked what he should do with his life, and Masumi, pocketing one coin for reasons he refused to examine, said honestly that he didn't know, but whatever it was, it would probably also end in this same gray field, asking the same gray questions, to someone equally unequipped to answer them.