Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once carried a blade with the calm of a man who believed every cut had a footnote, until the day among the cedar trees when the enemy turned out to be farmers clutching pitchforks instead of soldiers, and something in him quietly rugged itself right there in the underbrush. He fled to the hills, telling himself it was a scholarly retreat, and now narrates his own hermitage like a man live-tweeting a chart that only goes down. Each morning he vows to meditate at dawn, sharpen his mind, return to the disciplined ronin he annotated so admiringly in his youth, and each morning he instead apes into a bowl of weed and a stack of old scrolls he reads purely for the vibes. He has convinced himself that documenting his own cowardice in elegant prose counts as growth, footnoting his failures like a man who thinks citations are the same as courage. Still, when the wind moves through the trees just right, Yuji goes quiet, pen hovering, remembering that discipline he lost somewhere between the pitchforks and the punchline he became.