Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin still remembers the exact crack his arm made in the snow the winter he cut down three ronin who should have stayed dead in whatever ditch spawned them, and he has replayed that sound in his skull roughly four thousand times since, mostly at 3 a.m. He knows better now, he tells himself, which is why he keeps a splint, two backup splints, and a laminated diagram of his own skeleton in his gi like a man preparing for a war that ended before the current calendar existed. There is no battle left to fight, only floors that rug and charts that dump, yet Rin still stretches before checking his phone and tucks his arm protectively whenever someone laughs too loud near him. He tried, once, to meditate the anxiety away, sat for a full four minutes before convincing himself the room was on fire, and that discipline session ended the way they all do, with him pacing and recalculating worst-case scenarios instead of finding his breath. Some men make peace with the war being over; Rin simply moved the war inside his own ribs and never got the memo that the fighting stopped.