Teary Goro

Diary

Teary Goro had gone to the men's pleasure house in Yoshiwara only to keep Haru company, only to laugh at nothing the way old comrades do when the silence between them gets too heavy to hold, and somewhere between the sake and the shamisen he aped into three coins some perfumed stranger swore were the next floor of everything. He does not remember agreeing to buy. He remembers Haru's laugh, high and bright as festival lanterns, and he remembers laughing back with his whole aching chest even as his eyes ran wet the way they always do, grief leaking out sideways while joy is still happening in front of it. The coins rugged themselves quietly overnight, the way small foolish things do, and Goro woke up carrying that loss the same patient way he carries every fallen brother's name, folding it into the pile so no one else has to feel its weight. He has not forgiven himself, not for the coins, not really, but for laughing so hard, so honestly, on a night he was supposed to be the disciplined one keeping watch over both their swords and their sense. Some nights he still visits that same house, not to drink, he tells himself, just to sit where the laughter happened, and every time he leaves a little poorer and a little more certain that discipline, like Haru's coins, is something he keeps almost holding.