Just another writing blog

“You know my rule, 4 days, no more.”

“I don’t get that rule.”

Smiling again, he raised a gloved hand to scratch Shino behind the ears. “I know you don’t.” He offered no more explanation which didn’t seem to bother the little creature much. Mana merely looked head as he reached the top of the hill and re-adjusted the light pack on his back, almost completely empty of any supplies now. “Ah,” he said, having scoped out the landscape and seen their intended destination not an hour’s walk away. “See, Shino? That’s where we’re going.”

Shino merely crawled back into the scarf and curled up in the warm spot against Mana’s neck and once he was inside Mana heard him mumble, “Wake me up when we get there?”

As Mana carefully made his way down the other side of the hill he wondered what this next place was like. In less than a year he had travelled farther than most men would travel in their whole lifetime, and during that time he had seen and experienced many different things, people, cultures, ways of life. Some were good. Some were… well, not. Mana would always hesitate to say so, of course, it was not his place to judge a way of life he had merely strayed upon.

Yet sometimes it was hard to stand at the sidelines and watch, no man liked to sit and watch a train wreck happen before his very eyes, after all. But Mana had learned the art of restraint, to not do something just because it made him feel better about the situation. He would soon be leaving and before long the experience, the thing that outraged or saddened or sickened him would be but a distant memory, but his actions may leave an imprint on the village, town or city that would last a lifetime.

He was merely a breeze, something that you notice upon its passing but then forget as it disappears, having not made that significant an impact on your life.

That was how he liked it.

That, unlike most people whose footsteps he was following in, wasn’t why he traveled as he did. He did not want to be remembered. He did not want people to hail him. He most certainly did not want to be recognised as ‘the guy who did that thing’, whatever that thing may have been. If he was being overly critical he would probably say such people weren’t travelers but “aspiring heroes”, interested not in the travel but in the notoriety that may come from it.

In fact, there was no real reason for him to travel, but that was a different story, one, as they say, for another day.

Sometimes though, the call to act was too strong, the situation around him made some kind of connection that he just couldn’t ignore. Sometimes he couldn’t just forget and move on. Sometimes he couldn’t just do nothing and had to go against the inner voice that cautioned him about doing whatever he was thinking of doing, even something small, like giving someone a piece of bread. Those places were, as he called them, the bad ones (bad by his own standards, it must be said), the ones he tried his best to forget, or at least to push them into the back of his mind so that he wouldn’t think of them so often that he could scream. Most of them tiem that’s just what he managed to do. Really, it is the only way he would or could continue his journey without breaking down.

Some, though, would stay with him forever.