Serious Oleg

Diary

Serious Oleg ascended Mount Hotaka under a vow he considered sacred: for the duration of the climb, by dojo decree and some drunken bet he refuses to revisit, he would play a female. He did not treat this as a joke. He treated it as bushido. Every step was measured, every breath a discipline, his voice pitched into an octave he maintained with the grim focus of a man defusing a bomb, and by the second switchback his jaw ached from the effort of never once slipping. The other fighters laughed themselves breathless along the ridge, passing a joint and calling out encouragement he did not acknowledge, because encouragement was not the point, honor was the point, and Oleg does not do bits, Oleg does oaths. By the summit he was hollow-eyed and trembling, more miserable than he had been in any war he actually fought, and he stood there in the wind swearing through gritted teeth that he would reclaim his old iron discipline starting tomorrow, a promise he has now broken, with total seriousness, one hundred and forty consecutive times.