Saiyuki Drabble - The Perils of Literacy
Title: The Perils of Literacy
Author: kami_krazy
Rating/Warnings: Ummm...none, really. 58.
Summary: Sad stories get to me too much...and I know a certain someone in my head who suffers the same troubles as I do. Dedicated to the awesome and wonderful selvanic, without whom neither of us could get this worked up about something as silly as a short story. <3
Schooling was never that huge a priority. I learned enough to get by. To make sure I wasn't taken for a sucker. It always seemed like a waste of my time to sit in a classroom to learn shit like Geography and History when they wouldn't get me anywhere, so I just stuck to reading, writing and math. The stuff you actually needed if you were going to survive in the world. I never even went out of my way to own a book, my reading materials comfortably stuck at gambling tickets and the addresses pretty women wrote on stray scraps of paper when we met up in bars.
Of course, all that changed when Hakkai got settled in.
Not only was the house neater, the laundry done with the kind of reliability that you could plan your week around it, and a good hot meal put on the table at the appropriate time, the bookshelf I'd been using to store cigarettes and bottles of liquor was cleared off to hold a few actual books, everything else tucked away into its own little place somewhere else in the house. It became a normal thing to see Hakkai sitting on the couch when I got back from the late nights that got steadily shorter and shorter, flipping through the pages of an old favorite or something he'd just bought from the shabby used book store in town.
He always seemed to enjoy the things, too, so on one of the rare occasions when I had nothing to do, and he was out shopping...I decided to pick one out at random and see what the big deal was.
It took me a little while to get into it, not being a reader by habit. I picked the skinniest thing on the shelf in the hopes that it would be easy to read, but I was dissappointed. I'd always known that Hakkai was smarter than me -- especially after he'd finally told me about his past and how he had been a schoolteacher in his other life -- but seeing the tiny black print on the pages threw me off a little. I just ended up flipping through the chapters listlessly, convinced that I wouldn't find anything worth looking too deeply into.
I only stopped because one of the pages had been marked, really.
It was just a little scrap of paper...but it was a neat, precise rectangle, telling me that Hakkai had probably put it there. I figured that, if Hakkai had marked the page on purpose, whatever was on it was probably pretty good, since I hadn't seen him pick up this book in months, so I decided to put the effort into actually reading it.
It was just a short story. Like the other chapters of the book. It stood alone, the name of the person who'd written it printed in modest type under the title. It didn't seem like anything special.
But...
It was about a man who had come back to his hometown twenty years after leaving it and never looking back. About how he had waited that long to read a letter a friend had sent him, all that time ago, that he'd never had the courage to read. The story started in the present and went back to the past, going over a childhood friendship that slowly turned into something more and all of the anxieties that had come with love blossoming between two people who didn't really understand it. It put pictures in my head of a young boy whose father abused him because he was so afraid of being left alone that he couldn't stand the thought of his son being out of sight. My heart broke a little when it told me how life separated them, then how the jealous, possessive father killed his son, leaving his friend with nothing but a letter stuck into his luggage as he'd left to go to school in a far away city. It broke a little more when it finally came back to that friend, now alone in the ruins of a home he remembered fondly, finally opening the letter and reading the last words of someone he'd once loved.
I put the book away before Hakkai got home and just ended up sitting on the couch, staring down at my hands. The story had left an aching pain in my chest. It rubbed salt in the wound that reminded me every day that life wasn't fair. That you could go through it and find happiness just to have it yanked out of your hands by uncertainty. That you could find yourself alone some day, listening to your own regrets as you looked at the proof that someone, a long time ago, had loved you and then left you with nothing but the pain that came from knowing that you could never tell them that you loved them too.
I don't know how long I sat there, but I only looked up when the door opened and Hakkai came back in with his usual call of "Gojyo, I'm home". I don't even remember getting up, but the next thing I knew the bag of groceries he'd been carrying was on the floor and he was in my arms. It took him a little while to hug me back, but he did, and it just made me hold on tighter, mute because I didn't know how to tell him what was wrong, or tell him that I never wanted to feel the regret, the second-hand pain that was still lingering in my heart ever again.
"Gojyo? Is...Are you alright? What's wrong?"
"...I really wish I didn't know how to read..."
Author: kami_krazy
Rating/Warnings: Ummm...none, really. 58.
Summary: Sad stories get to me too much...and I know a certain someone in my head who suffers the same troubles as I do. Dedicated to the awesome and wonderful selvanic, without whom neither of us could get this worked up about something as silly as a short story. <3
Schooling was never that huge a priority. I learned enough to get by. To make sure I wasn't taken for a sucker. It always seemed like a waste of my time to sit in a classroom to learn shit like Geography and History when they wouldn't get me anywhere, so I just stuck to reading, writing and math. The stuff you actually needed if you were going to survive in the world. I never even went out of my way to own a book, my reading materials comfortably stuck at gambling tickets and the addresses pretty women wrote on stray scraps of paper when we met up in bars.
Of course, all that changed when Hakkai got settled in.
Not only was the house neater, the laundry done with the kind of reliability that you could plan your week around it, and a good hot meal put on the table at the appropriate time, the bookshelf I'd been using to store cigarettes and bottles of liquor was cleared off to hold a few actual books, everything else tucked away into its own little place somewhere else in the house. It became a normal thing to see Hakkai sitting on the couch when I got back from the late nights that got steadily shorter and shorter, flipping through the pages of an old favorite or something he'd just bought from the shabby used book store in town.
He always seemed to enjoy the things, too, so on one of the rare occasions when I had nothing to do, and he was out shopping...I decided to pick one out at random and see what the big deal was.
It took me a little while to get into it, not being a reader by habit. I picked the skinniest thing on the shelf in the hopes that it would be easy to read, but I was dissappointed. I'd always known that Hakkai was smarter than me -- especially after he'd finally told me about his past and how he had been a schoolteacher in his other life -- but seeing the tiny black print on the pages threw me off a little. I just ended up flipping through the chapters listlessly, convinced that I wouldn't find anything worth looking too deeply into.
I only stopped because one of the pages had been marked, really.
It was just a little scrap of paper...but it was a neat, precise rectangle, telling me that Hakkai had probably put it there. I figured that, if Hakkai had marked the page on purpose, whatever was on it was probably pretty good, since I hadn't seen him pick up this book in months, so I decided to put the effort into actually reading it.
It was just a short story. Like the other chapters of the book. It stood alone, the name of the person who'd written it printed in modest type under the title. It didn't seem like anything special.
But...
It was about a man who had come back to his hometown twenty years after leaving it and never looking back. About how he had waited that long to read a letter a friend had sent him, all that time ago, that he'd never had the courage to read. The story started in the present and went back to the past, going over a childhood friendship that slowly turned into something more and all of the anxieties that had come with love blossoming between two people who didn't really understand it. It put pictures in my head of a young boy whose father abused him because he was so afraid of being left alone that he couldn't stand the thought of his son being out of sight. My heart broke a little when it told me how life separated them, then how the jealous, possessive father killed his son, leaving his friend with nothing but a letter stuck into his luggage as he'd left to go to school in a far away city. It broke a little more when it finally came back to that friend, now alone in the ruins of a home he remembered fondly, finally opening the letter and reading the last words of someone he'd once loved.
I put the book away before Hakkai got home and just ended up sitting on the couch, staring down at my hands. The story had left an aching pain in my chest. It rubbed salt in the wound that reminded me every day that life wasn't fair. That you could go through it and find happiness just to have it yanked out of your hands by uncertainty. That you could find yourself alone some day, listening to your own regrets as you looked at the proof that someone, a long time ago, had loved you and then left you with nothing but the pain that came from knowing that you could never tell them that you loved them too.
I don't know how long I sat there, but I only looked up when the door opened and Hakkai came back in with his usual call of "Gojyo, I'm home". I don't even remember getting up, but the next thing I knew the bag of groceries he'd been carrying was on the floor and he was in my arms. It took him a little while to hug me back, but he did, and it just made me hold on tighter, mute because I didn't know how to tell him what was wrong, or tell him that I never wanted to feel the regret, the second-hand pain that was still lingering in my heart ever again.
"Gojyo? Is...Are you alright? What's wrong?"
"...I really wish I didn't know how to read..."