Forget Koi, Remember Mother
He wants to become sick and struggle with something that will seize him from the inside out rather than spend another day with the same thoughts in an impenetrable gloom.
He waits for sickness to claim him, to make him weak and sapped of energy, then lets the rain wash over his melancholy.
Weeks without a single answer from a familiar voice grates the grandson's anxiety so much, it shows. He feels helpless, seeing the lifelessness in his mother's eyes, eating and sleeping, fading from the world and all its natural wonder. The ultimate irony for the grandson, who is uninterested in yet another of the same dinner. That the world they share with other creatures, those koi fish he knows, can be so cruel and cynical. But whether animals and fish feel such complexity as people do, the grandson does not know for sure. His younger brother cannot be found by him, by the police, the indifferent soldiers, and certainly not his mother, tired. She always seems tired these days. She has not spent much energy, but it has nothing to do with exercise. He gets why.
He would hate to give up on something so important, but to leave his mother for places beyond their home would be inherently risky, so precarious and uncertain that he would not know his left from his right. Everything has stopped making sense since his father passed in battle, then his grandfather, then his younger brother's abandonment, and now his mother, gone to early sleep. He waits at her bedside, unsure what to do, thinking about what he should and cannot do. She gives little words of empathy, too empty on the inside to even look at him. She then sleeps.
Children run away from pain, lie to invent a new identity, find solitude in darkness, and forget unless the grandson assumes much. His younger brother could be somewhere else now, someone different, someone else than someone before, and someone who wants seclusion. He sits outside, listening to the raindrops fall upon the home, the wood and the water, the garden. He will never find his younger brother because some people do not want to be found, not ever, and so, the grandson assumes much. He could pray at the family shrine and go to places beyond himself, but he would not do that. It feels too tiring to keep thinking, so in the rain, he walks towards the koi fish pond, hoping to see his younger brother's face again, even for a moment.
Standing in the rain, he will get a chill, he may become bedridden, and sickness might distract him from analyzing where things have gone, with him and his family, broken and fractured. He wants to become sick and struggle with something that will seize him from the inside out rather than spend another day with the same thoughts in an impenetrable gloom. He waits for sickness to claim him, to make him weak and sapped of energy, then lets the rain wash over his melancholy. He looks to the sky, closes his eyes, and wonders where his younger brother has gone today.
Hours pass, and the grandson, soggy with rainwater, has caught a cold, a chill that will manifest into the perfect sickness. A sickness that will make everything that haunts and bothers him so trivial, as this sickness succumbs him to symptoms of a bad cold, which, if left untreated, may become a fever, an outcome the grandson does not desire but will accept if it means weakness. He allows his whole person to grow weak and frail, no different from his mother, spending less time being present and more time being alone. He shivers and coughs, shakes, and sneezes, finding the perfect sickness to rid any motivation left of caring. He only cares about one thing.
Getting healthy and stable. A week of his lifetime. Lifetime that slips away.
