Teary Goro

Diary

Midnight found Teary Goro sitting alone on the engawa of a half-collapsed dojo outside Kanazawa, knees folded the way his old sensei taught him, trying to still a mind that had not been quiet since the wars ended and everyone he loved stopped needing graves dug for them. He meant to meditate, truly he did, but somewhere between the third breath and the fourth can of chuhai the meditation curdled into a master plan, the kind only a true degen could birth at 3 a.m. with tears already drying tracks down his cheeks from a joke he'd laughed at alone. He laughed again now, wetly, because the plan was good, degen-good, floor-sweeping good, and there was no one left standing beside him to slap his back and tell him so, so he told himself, voice cracking on the punchline. He gathered the plan up gently, the way he gathers everything now, like it too might be something fallen that needs carrying, and pressed it against his chest like a name he refuses to let the wind take. By dawn the mind he'd promised to clear was noisier than ever, littered with schemes and ghosts in equal measure, and Goro simply smiled through the salt on his face, because discipline was a duel he kept losing and grief was the only sensei who never left.