Time passed. And, much as I enjoyed it, Rio came to feel like a way station, not a destination; a breather, not the end of the march. There was an aimlessness to my days there, an aimlessness that my focus on jujitsu alleviated but didn't dispel. From time to time I would remembre Tatsu telling me you can't retire, spoken with equal parts confidence and sadness, and those words, which I had first taken to be a threat and then understood to be merely a prediction, came in my memory to bear the weight of something else, something more akin to prophecy.
He glanced to his right, a neurolinguistic sign of imagination, not of recall. He was trying to make something up, to find a way out of the corner he had just painted himself into.
Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or envy, when I'm being honest with myself. Always with alienation. Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.
I felt a valve closing over my empathy like a watertight bulkhead. The bulkhead would open later, I knew, as the pressure built behind it, but it would hold long enough for me to finish the matter at hand.
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