A/N: This was born from trying to kick myself out of writer's block. Hope you enjoy!
The offseason disorients Yuri
for who is he without a competition for motivation?
He is a boy with professionalism as a facade:
now, as a compass with a demagnetized needle
Yuri walks with an aimless gait around Tokyo
because he's not ready to go home in Russia yet:
there's too much to see and he's not gonna admit
he wants to spend time sight-seeing
as a regular normal tourist,
no one particularly special,
rather than go home
only to wear expectations on his shoulders
that he cannot bear to carry.
The wooden stares of assumption
gives Yuri a prickling sense of anxiety,
and now he's got to deal with being normal
(even if he likes it, being no one but himself).
He is seventeen, on the cusp of something more
and he wants to push himself to elite status;
Grandfather says his ambition gets
The best of him,
But where would he be
Without that pound of ambition
That landed him here in the first place?
Grandfather doesn't seem to have an answer
for that, except for repeating the notion
of the importance of rest.
A life where people gush at the
mere thought of his name,
alight with passion that comes with ice skating
the same passion that sets Yuri's heart aflame
with unbridled ecstasy the color of his one-track mind
(cornflower blue, like his piercing gaze,
flecked with shiny gold, like the medals he hopes to win)
doesn't make Yuri want to rest
(he can do that when he's dead);
instead he wants to work so hard, winning
becomes second nature.
Until the off season ends,
Yuri is just a tourist in Tokyo,
the unfamiliar city that becomes more interesting
with days passing into one another without much fanfare,
pushing himself out of the comforting bubble of ice skating.