Gloomy Masumi

Diary

Masumi once carried a code the way other men carry swords, close, sharpened, load-bearing, and he lost it the way most things get lost on Degens Path: slowly, then all at once, in a cloud of Raiku's rolled weed and a silence that no longer felt like discipline, just absence. He remembers thinking the smoke would clear his head; instead it cleared out the last of his old vows, floor price included, rugged by his own hand while Raiku laughed like it was nothing. He tried, briefly, to meditate his way back to the dojo mind, sat cross-legged for four minutes before his knees ached and his thoughts wandered to snacks, which he considers proof enough that enlightenment was never really aping in his direction. Now he says, with the flat calm of a man reading a coroner's report on his own spirit, that he looks forward to better days, fully aware the odds are bad and the house, as always, is the house. It is not hope exactly, more like scheduling grief for later, but he keeps the appointment anyway, and there is something almost disciplined in that.