P:Her Name was Yuko

by P (name anon'd)

Her name was Yuko Hiji. "Hiji" means "elbow" in Japanese, so she basically had an unusual name. [Note: The name has been changed.] She was a student in my English class, sort of. (She wasn't enrolled in the school, but took classes occasionally.) She was very interested in English, and was attracted to me; I was lonely, having arrived in Japan and just finished my "red carpet phase" and gone on to the "it's fair weather, where are all my friends?" phase of being lonely. She went to Kyoai High School -- if you pay attention to my posts, you'll know that Kyoai has the cutest sailor suit uniforms in the prefecture -- and was to graduate in two months. She was 18 and I was 22. It started at the Christmas Party for the school I was working at. We started getting drawn to each other. A few days later I asked her out; we had a nice Japanese Sunday date, and I took her to Mahatma New Dehli, a great Indian restaurant in my city. (Everyone should eat Indian food, it's the best in the world.) The same day I had to go to a nearby church and play Santa Claus; she tagged along with me. After amusing the kids as best I could, I went down to where she was waiting for me -- I really wanted to go back to where she was. Our first kiss was while I was still wearing the "Santa Wear": she sat on my lap and I said, "Kiss me," and she got shy and said, "I've never been kissed," so I kissed her. Santa kissing Yuko.

Our love affair progressed from there. Our first love making was on Christmas day. She quit the school to avoid conflict of interests. We loved each other a lot, but at the same time knew ahead of time the month and date it was going to end: March 25, the day she left for America to go to college in a city in California. That day came with incredible speed. Before I knew it, I was riding the Shinkansen into Ueno with her, then transfering to the Skyline into Narita. She cried and cried, but for some reason, I couldn't cry as I said goodbye to her. Then she said I should leave, she couldn't get on the plane if I was still there. So I got on the escalator and watched her as she slowly moved out of my view. I didn't realize until after it was over how much I had loved her, and the three months after that were the hardest I have ever gone through over a broken heart. She is studying now in America at a university. She wrote me a few times, but you know how that is. She said she had fallen in love with a Chinese guy at the same school. "It's not very nice to say to you, Peter, but I love him so much, so much," she said to me when I called her once. I told her I was genuinely happy for her. She gave me a lot, taught me a lot of Japanese (I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying that; but in my defense I taught her a lot of English as well, and I have no shame over anything), and taught me one other thing as well, the Japanese word "mae-muki" which means "facing forward" and means living your life positively, not negatively. Up to that time I had been really negative about Japan; but after she taught that word to me and told me what it meant, I realized I had so much to be happy about, so many reasons to be positive about my life. Except that I had lost a great girl.

I'll never forget Yuko.

The layout and design of this site are (c) 1998 by LEoM and may not be reproduced without permission. The stories and content are (c) the respective authors, used with permission, or believed to be in the public domain unless otherwise stated.

Contents   -   Welcome  -   Links   -   Rendered 01/13/1999 at 3:27:04 AM.

This site was rendered with Frontier on a PowerPC Clone.