Igor The Bear

Diary

Igor The Bear does not remember choosing that morning outside the shoji doors, only that the courtesans would not stop laughing and the blade did not care whose honor it was defending. They took what they took, and now the memory sits in him the way he sits in everything, slow to arrive, impossible to move once it lands. Every dawn he tries to leave it behind on the tatami like a bad hand folded early, tells himself discipline means walking past the doors without flinching, and every dawn he ends up parked there anyway, heavy as a boulder someone forgot to finish rolling downhill. He copes the degen way, a little weed before the ritual grief, a worse bet after it, watching his floor price and his dignity get rugged on the same lousy chart. Underneath the mass there is still warmth, still the old soldier who wanted to be steady, but Igor has learned that some wounds do not heal, they just get slower and heavier and sit with you at the door like an old friend who never leaves.