The Love of a Lifetime
I had met my second boyfriend in college. We met in one of my Japanese classes and we were good friends at first. It was surprising when I found out he had a crush on me, and this was about a year after I had broken up with my high school sweetheart. He had asked me out in a quiet, kind of shy cliché romance way. I guess he knew I liked that type.
His name was Jaydin Hikari Sasaki. He was Japanese-American, and was only going to a Japanese class to learn about his heritage. From what I found out later, he had approached me one day after class because out of all the other students in the class, he noticed me, and when he first talked to me it was when he finally had the guts to. I think it was love at first sight, but he never admitted it.
He didn’t exactly have any other classes with me, but I found out he was taking a print media class too, but it was different from mine. His career goal was to work in the publishing industry—just like me, only he wanted to publish and edit, not draw and do all the hard and complicated things I had a passion for.
We were together for over half a year when we decided to go to Japan together in our senior year of college. We went during a break in the year, when we didn’t have to go to class, and we were in Japan for about two weeks. It was so different there! And there were a lot of romantic sceneries…. We kept telling our friends how it was there, until they got annoyed and had heard the stories a thousand times.
We stayed together for about nine years, total. When I went to live in Japan with my sister, Amanda, for a few years, we even kept in contact, but with my work at Ribon keeping me busy so often, I barely spoke to him awake. When I was around twenty-nine, though, he surprised me with a visit. What was more surprising—after a few days of becoming a loving couple again, he proposed! It was so sudden. I was expecting it, since we had talked about it before I left for Japan, but I never thought it would actually happen.
So, after finishing the final chapter of the manga I was working on, Nashi Yume, Amanda and I packed up and went back to America with my new fiancé. We began planning our wedding, and I called to get my job back at Tokyopop after the whole event. I was staying at Jaydin’s after we got back, and my sister was there, too. We were also planning to buy a house; we had a good amount of money, since I had won a lot in Japan when I was nominated for some manga and anime awards, plus Jaydin’s steady income from his job as an Author and Artists Relations Associate at Tokyopop.
The wedding was—as every girl says—the most special day of my life. We had an Asian wedding in 2023, and both our families helped pay for it. It was a small, simple wedding—nothing too expensive, but still beautiful. It was a winter wedding, somewhere between the time when the leaves finished falling and the snow began to rain somewhere else in the world. There were flower and tree decorations, firecrackers, ceremonial wine, a very important sacred fruit from a symbolic tree that was part of a legend of love in Vietnam, the phoenix and dragon candles from a Vietnamese wedding, and I wore a bright red Vietnamese dress with a swan-like phoenix and dragon hand-embroidered one it and Jaydin wore a formal silk suit. My whole family was there, my brother and his wife, my siblings, my parents, and all my closest friends: mostly lifelong friends and some people who I’ve kept in contact with who were from middle and high school; and Jaydin’s family and friends were there, too. At the reception, there was roasted pig, too, because of Vietnamese tradition, but I didn’t eat it.
After the wedding, we quickly got back to normal life. We bought a house, and Amanda became our roommate, but it wasn’t much trouble. We liked having her around. I went back to Tokyopop, but worked at home, and Amanda was my assistant sometimes: she did some of the final touches on my manga, like toning and editing. My husband worked at the office, but was my personal manager and agent, since he had to arrange schedules and all that stuff. We were good for a while, life was good, and Jaydin was supporting me all the way as I tried to accomplish my dreams, no matter how hard and stressing it was.
He cheered me up when I was sad, he knew when to make me laugh, he comforted me and kept with me, and loved me. He was kind and caring, shy and quiet, polite and modest, and sweet and strong. He wasn’t exactly strong physically, but his heart was strong. I loved him the most for that. Sure, he had some flaws, like he would stress about his job or complain about some random small things sometimes, but that was what I was there for—to help him out and listen to him, and to return his love and care. I didn’t mind flaws. It was like a habit that was hard to get rid of. I guess I got used to it.
I believe in true love. I believed that if we loved each other in a past life, that was why we were lovers in our life right now, and we were going to be lovers again in the next life, too. I like cliché romances, because they’re sweet and simple, but say everything they need to say. I never knew why, in books and manga and other things, they always made saying “I love you” so hard, but I found it was true—it was hard, till I said it to the love of my life for the first time. I knew it was true, because I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t. It’s hard finding it in you to actually know that feeling and trust your heart when it says that you belong with that one special person.
I knew it, and so did Jaydin. I think destiny set us up, just like destiny had set so many other things up to make me feel like life was hard—till he came along and made things easier. He took care of me, he loved me, and I returned these feelings without inhibitions, and I never once took any moment I had with him for granted. I regretted every moment I couldn’t see him. Fate put us together because, to put it short, we were soul mates. Fate made us friends at first, but somehow that changed. I couldn’t help it… I fell in love. I fell in love with Jaydin.
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