IA; Happiness
Title: In Actuality
Summary: Five truths about Heiwajima Shizuo.
Chapter: 4/5 - Happiness
Heiwajima Shizuo is basically content.
Certainly, he has his stresses just like anyone else. A wonderful, perfectly fitting job that nonetheless forces him to confront the scum of the online-dating world on a daily basis; a bad case of flea; the usual thugs, psychotic pen-wielding schoolboys, and tazer-brandishing yakuza heirs trying to kill him; those damn Dollars and Yellow Scarves and Blue Squares and Pink Eyemasks or whatever the fuck is next, with all their idiotic gang war nonsense; bills.
Shizuo has plenty of things to get irritated about. And he does, don't make any mistake about that. Shizuo gets pissed off, Shizuo loses control, Shizuo throws vending machines and parking meters and trash cans and even the occasional small tree or wailing journalist. Shizuo terrifies the public and tries to murder Izaya, and then he smokes another cigarette to calm himself down, and he starts walking.
Even for such a pedestrian city, even considering that he rarely ever leaves Ikebukuro, Shizuo walks far more than the average person. Whenever he's not otherwise occupied, he tends to wander the streets, and in fact he never takes the subway or metro around. He doesn't like it -odd, for a Tokyo native, but there it is. Part of this attitude is born from Shizuo's nervousness about his temper, or rather what would happen if he lost it in a confined, fragile space such as a car or train. But mostly, it's just how he is - Shizuo is simply the kind of person who likes to get around on his own two feet.
He won't say no to driving if necessary, and he's actually very fond of riding on the back of Celty's motorcycle, but if left to his own devices he's not going to seek anything like that out.
And there are effects from all of this walking around. Firstly, Shizuo knows his city very well. He is familiar with every street, alley, and park Ikebukuro has to offer. Not so much in any other district of Tokyo, as Shizuo generally stays within 'Bukuro, but he still can navigate fairly easily throughout most of Japan's capital city. In Ikebukuro, though, Shizuo knows all the big landmarks, and he knows the dozens of smaller ones, too. He knows the best little cafes tucked away down a side-street or seven; where to get a good haircut for half the usual price; the location and times he can expect parks to be peaceful and quiet; a bar that seats only six but has the best drinks in town; tiny but amazing family-owned chocolate stores, restaurants, flower shops, grocery stores; a reliable dry-cleaner's; and the location of most every cigarette vendor in all of Ikebukuro.
But even more so than knowing the city itself, Shizuo sees the people it contains, both good and bad. He's not going to claim that he 'knows' them - Shizuo has never been very astute about social matters, and the other person he will claim to truly understand is himself. And he is so far from even the oddest of most other people that for the most part, Shizuo doesn't attempt to transfer that knowledge into predicting or interpreting other peoples' actions.
Shizuo doesn't claim to understand the people he sees, but he does at least see them, and in watching the people surrounding him, he has over the years come to realize a few things about his own life.
Namely, that it's not so bad.
It's not that great, either - but, it's not terrible. Because Shizuo does actually know himself, he has been able to compare himself to the people he observes while walking around the city for endless hours, and he's come to the conclusion that he's pretty much content.
He has a job, a home, a family, and friends. That's a lot more than some people have, even if each of those things he has is less (smaller, fewer, further distant) than most.
Shizuo is, at heart, a laid-back sort of guy. Setting his temper aside for the moment, he doesn't tend to get worked up about things, and as such avoids a lot of the everyday drama most people seem to experience. Granted, his own unique attributes and acquaintances generally get him involved in far more rigorous types of drama instead, but Shizuo's life is basically like water in a river. It flows along, following the natural contours of the earth, making no fuss, and if sometimes or very frequently it crashes into violent rapids and waterfalls, it's always going to follow its path and calm down again into a soothing flow.
(Shizuo is fond of this metaphor, even if he realizes that it's pretty inaccurate, because it allows the hope that in the end the river might flow into a calm lake, with an undisturbed island in the center.)
Shizuo's life doesn't need to be like everyone else's. He's got all of his basic needs fulfilled, and has even managed to make some progress on his desires, too. He has no reason to hate his life, just as he doesn't really have any reason to love it - so Shizuo, very practiced at simply accepting things the way they are, is willing to accept this too. His life is okay, and he's content with it.
His life is... disconnected in a way, it's far too vivid in all the wrong arenas, and Shizuo is just too unmoved by most events. He walks throughout Ikebukuro, and he sees people who experience every emotion so easily in a way he just isn't capable of. Shizuo's emotions are encased in layers of stone, sealed off from most of the world, and it takes correspondingly strong blows to break through and expose them. Once reached, he feels that his emotions strike him far harder than they do anyone else, though perhaps that's just a result of him not really understanding how other people operate at all.
What this means is that it takes catastrophically dramatic events to even phase Shizuo, and unless something of that sort is going on, Shizuo isn't going to get worked up about anything. His rages don't even count in that regard; for the most part, they aren't even anything personal, just a facet of Shizuo that he can't control going wild and settling down again. So long as he can just put his sunglasses back on and walk away after such anger, it doesn't really affect how Shizuo views his day anymore; he's learned to take those occurrences for granted, to deal with them and move on.
And so, to himself and to others if they ever asked, Shizuo will freely acknowledge that he's pretty content with the state of his life.
What he is far less willing to say, is that his contentedness springs mostly from resignation and a lack of true involvement. Nothing makes his life terrible, because Shizuo knows he does have some good things going for him and because Shizuo is so incredibly indestructible that it takes a lot to make anything truly terrible for him.
But nothing make his life great either, and for all he hopes, Shizuo isn't the most imaginative man, and he can't picture anything ever doing so. He stands apart from others, unaffected and unhurt throughout most everything, and this means that he doesn't really suffer enough to feel anything less than contentment.
It also means that he's never truly happy either, and Shizuo yearns desperately for such an emotion. He goes to great lengths to believe that one day he will be able to experience it. Though he's not like Izaya, doesn't claim to love or even especially care about humanity at large, Shizuo does envy them horribly for their capability to be truly happy.
Shizuo isn't, and hasn't ever been.
But he's never been broken yet either, and so long as that's true, Shizuo remains content. Anything more is impossible; anything less - just indulgence.
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Other chapters: Anger, Love, Pain