You know, sometimes I ask myself about my own life.
By almost anyone's standards I'm still a young man, a man who's seen nearly fifteen years of his life folded away quietly somewhere in the zone of forgetting. Sometimes I try to tell myself that those years were part of my growing up part of the necessary steps I had to take in order to become an adult. I watch the people around me - in the street, the market, the relatively tidy lives of those who spend their daylight hours confined within their businesses - and I see how they take those hours and days and months for granted. To do such a thing at this point, to be perfectly honest, scares me.
People sometimes ask me about myself, just in passing, you know. I nod, I make small talk, and I tell little white lies. Not because I'm ashamed, for I know - have always known - that killing people was never within me. Ignorant of the past, yes. But people are prejudiced and judgemental, and their own past experiences have served to darken their thoughts and expectations. Like they expect the worst. Like they are indoctrinated into thinking that it's always best to believe the worst...for in that way you can rarely be caught out. Truth is, I'm not trying to catch anyone, but then again I wouldn't expect them to know that. I'm a stranger now, just like everyone else who passes in the street, and it seems a shame that these days, not one person can smile at a child, an adult even, and not be received with some air of suspicion.
I'll find my true fate, sure I will. I was never afraid of it, and it'll come my way, but for now, just for a little while, I will take the time to look at the world once more. To try and see it for what it truly is. I forgot how it was, and I find myself in a position where I'm learning all over again. There is a certain magic in the process, like sight returning to the blind, hearing to the deaf, but there is equally pain in my recognition that as we have advanced in so many ways, we have also walked backwards.
And the building where I was once a boy still remains. It is not standing, it is not engaged, yet it exists in it's own way. Foundations, eroding, sharp glass. It is, ironically, damp. The windows are broken and molded - the darkness of it's burnt elm very much beyond any beauty it had once been handed. The remnants of doors hangs from its rusted, peeling hinges and leans out across the barely-there front steps like a drunk. When you stand on those steps you can feel your weight threatening the very fabric of the structure. But still, I went back in there. Went inside.
I was alone, of course, it was as quiet as a cemetery, and once inside I moved slowly, carefully, walking on eggshells. I shed some tears. For some reason, I think of my brothers. For myself. I would believe that they would be proud of me in a way, because the three of us would have reminded the other of a part of our lives that is now gone. Not forgotten, just gone. A part that is better gone.
What happened, happened. Maybe I should, too. It wasn't my fault. I know that now. After so many years.
The first time I returned to it, I did not go upstairs. I told myself that it was dangerous, that perhaps the rooms were unsafe, still riddled with toxic fumes and burnt flesh. That was not the truth. So I went back, I steeled myself, and I went up there like a ghost from my own past; stood there in the smogged remnants of my room and looked in through the door. I left with a shard of thick glass, clutching that small fraction, the surface intact. A parchment lay beneath, fogged from the years of abandonment and thick ash that still clung to the air. Sketchings of me, my family and unfortunately, my mother sat underneath it. I could not keep it here any longer. I needed the relief within me and the comfort that picture gave to me. I needed it.
I will leave Kou Empire for good one day; have that sparring session that I promised with Alibaba and I will eventually decide what to do and where to go. For now it doesn't matter. I have time. A different kind of time. Like each day is a new thing, and I want for it to mean something.
I ask myself what life is, what does it mean? Perhaps nothing more than a story, and each story different and rare and pronounced with its own voice. Some lives rich and heady, tales told with such fervour and passion. Other lives racing forward with such power one would be carried along by the sheer momentum of events, and don't care how they've been told. Or what language had been used. Just that they were, and you were there to hear about them. I believed - once upon an age ago - that I would perhaps have such a life.
I lost my belief. But then it was recovered.