Drown
(Hasegawa/Hatsu)
He forgets how uncomfortable kneeling is.
The pavement makes him remember; sharp pebbles make him feel as if his knees were to break into pieces and tiny stones of gravel sink into the flesh of his palms. His arched back reminds him sharply that it is ten, twenty years too late to do what he is doing now.
He does not listen. Recently he seems to be listening only to his conscience and bottles of cheap sake and both talk to him in Gintoki's voice.
This part of town is uncomfortably quiet. There is not a single light to be seen through the paper doors, not a single lantern marking a place where to get a drink or which is better to avoid.
In Kabukicho, those are usually one and the same. But this is not Kabukicho, and he finds it difficult to believe that there are people who sleep at night and wake in the morning, eat breakfast miso on their porches and kiss their wives before leaving. People content with their lives to the point when they sleep through the sunrise instead of drinking last drops of soju before closing the noodle stall or pushing palms on their eyelids in frantic effort to make the nightmares go away.
(He told him he would not tell anyone. He did not tell him that everyone already knew.)
The estate is spacious, easily taking in the area of half of Kabukichou. It seems to him that any minute, it will devour the town hungrily, narrow streets of tiny paper houses, the outskirts lined with never lit lanterns, the river bank seeped with smell of fish and garbage and rot.
He wonders if he felt such an awe back then as well. He does not remember; all he can recall is sight of his own sandals and her arched back in front of them. She was clad in green kimono
(and it was cheap green of cheap fabric and it was making her face look thin and ill and his shoes were cheap and chipped from him stumbling on the pavement tiles and the rim of his hakama was ripped and he felt like he would desecrate her by asking her to repair it)
and he does not want to remember, does not want to relive the feelings he could never describe with words, because he is not a poet and not a scholar and not anything else that would make him worth her. Love, mostly love, but it was that kind of love that should have never existed, that constricts you around your neck like a rope, that ties your wrists with barbed wire and fills your throat with bile, because nothing is enough, nothing can ever be enough and you drown and watch your wife beg for you and her parents, her own parents-
His cheek lying on the concrete is wet. The dew fell, he notices. The sun will rise soon to its full, people will wake (and eat breakfast miso on their porches and kiss their wives before leaving, just like people do, the ones not drowning and not suffocating) and will find him, unshaved man dressed in rags, smelling like bad liqour and garbage and sweat, bowing on their front road. He sighs and stands, sharp stones leaving dents in his shins. He never looks on the house. It was not important in the first place.
"Tommorrow," he mutters and it sounds like blabbering of drunkards, and maybe is. "I'll go there, tommorrow."
The clap of his sandals long resonates in the waking neighbourhood.