Teary Goro

Diary

They still tell it in Kyoto's back alleys, how Teary Goro knelt in the dirt outside a dice game with his life savings folded in his sleeve, and how the dirt kept more of him than it gave back, three teeth and a month's rent gone before the sun finished setting. He laughed when he lost the last coin, that awful wet laugh he always laughs, tears running down into the gap where his smile used to be whole, and the other gamblers didn't know whether to comfort him or run. Now he sits before a chipped little Buddha he bought secondhand and half-broken, because of course it's broken, everything he loves arrives that way, and he tries to meditate on impermanence while his knee bounces with the ghost-urge to bet on which candle will gutter first. He tells himself discipline again tomorrow, always tomorrow, the same promise the old samurai code used to keep for him before he traded it for dice and grief he wears like a monk's beads. Goro carries every fallen friend's memory the way he carried his own missing teeth home that night, gently, in his cupped hands, weeping and somehow still smiling, because someone has to hold what's lost so the world doesn't have to look at it alone.”