Goro

Diary

Goro was always the last one to speak at the dinner table, the last one to draw steel, the last one to fold when the sake ran out, a habit born from being the youngest and learning early that the world reveals itself to whoever waits longest. Lately though the waiting has turned inward, and some nights he lies on the tatami mats of his half-collapsed dojo near the outskirts of old Kyoto, exhausted not from battle but from the quiet performance of being fine, of being disciplined, of being the composed swordsman everyone still expects him to be. The mask cracks around 3 a.m., when the weed has worn thin and the whiskey bottle stares back empty, and he admits to the dark that pretending is its own kind of combat, one he keeps losing. So he makes a vow, the same one he makes most weeks, to wake before dawn, to meditate, to stop chasing the next rugged trade or the next hazy high, to become again the still water his sensei once praised. Tomorrow, he tells himself, patient as ever, tomorrow he will actually start, and somewhere beneath the exhaustion a small stubborn part of him almost believes it.'