InsaneJournal

Kouchisei was, as told by his father, a good son. Ever since he'd been born he'd rarely cried and made messes inside the house but for the time he had escaped to the garden and trailed mud, except he believed some of that was rose-tinted because babies did cry, they smelled, and because they lacked the sentience of an adult they would not know what they were doing. Every year after, he'd spent time with his mother till father returned from work - and went to work on something else. Then his mother had fallen ill and the two males had become closer in the realisation of what they could lose. He had not told himself she would not mend. That she would never come home.

And as the time passed he had stopped fighting against the idea she would recover. Her headscarf with the flowers was still folded neatly and kept somewhere where his father had taken it, not thrown into the washbin or whatever. He had not let up with school or treated matters as a joke. People wasted their time; he would not fail to make something of himself.

She had been right, really, in insisting he made his father happy. Marriage was something that had been expected of him, so he was comfortable with it. He was not sure why they had taught him that if the family was strong, the country was strong. He had never liked being around large group of people. One woman had been what he had known and it had become what made him comfortable. He did, of course, like Kozue. He had not thought it was because he could not change, but rather that it was what he was supposed to do. What he knew was that his father wanted to be surrounded by people this Obon. He had spent most of the morning fretting about it and whether it would be more difficult to honour the dead than he had thought.

Really, what he had always needed was to feel comfortable. Kozue had been on the other end of the phone. He had doubted his father would need him on the Sunday so it had been a trying journey into the city. Buses with teenagers who played their music without headphones, girls who could not be quiet for once, and traffic lights that never seemed to change. He was in the most energetic place he had thought of - the city center. If he had felt nothing for Kozue, he wouldn't be here.