Have you ever experienced that one moment in time, that one short minute, that life all seems to come together? Though you don’t completely understand why. In just that quick sixty seconds you have that understanding, know the meaning, you’re not quite sure what it is but you can’t help but hold it dear to your heart.

     That’s when I found it, that’s when I knew. I found so much more than I ever expected to know. I felt so much than I ever imagined I would ever feel. I learned, but yet, at the same time, I didn’t completely understand it ALL.

     *Laughs softly* let me start from the beginning, I guess. That’s where you start right? When you are trying to explain something to someone?

     It all started that one August night. The air was summery warm, yet rain still fell from the sky. Each drop that fell was like liquid fire to my skin and at the same moment it froze me to the bone.

     Yes there was a beginning to that night. After all, all tales have a beginning, it’s the end that . . . . Doesn’t always seem to come. That night I had gotten into another fight with my okaasan (mother). That night I had walked out of the house barefooted, not caring that it was raining, or that I might become ill. It was that night, that would never bring me to the end.

      It seems silly really. A little past midnight, and here I was, a seventeen-year-old female walking the streets alone. You may think I was just screaming for it to happen, but in actuality I just wanted to get away. Looking up at the sky, that’s when I heard it, the softness of another’s breath. That’s when I realized I was not alone.

      I turned to look at a familiar face that I knew would be there. We had said that this was where we would meet if something went wrong. I couldn’t stop the smile spread across my face, and with that same instant terror took hold of my soul when my eye caught sight of what was before me. There the man I loved more than anything was being held at gunpoint, the obvious mugger smirking in triumph. I ran the few feet between koi (love) and I, though it seemed forever.

     “Iie! Matte! Yamero! (No! Wait! Stop!)” I yelled, dooming my koi to his inevitable doom sooner than I thought.

      I had startled the mugger and his finger pulled the trigger. Shocked he turned and ran with my koi’s belongings. It’s the next sixty seconds I am talking about. It’s that moment I couldn’t understand yet I understood all. My first thought was ‘Doshite (why)’ but as I sat there holding my koi’s head in my lap whispering to him that everything was going to be alright, that I wasn’t going to let this happen, I wasn’t going to let this end, he said it, the one thing that made me understand.
“Aishiteru (I love you)” he whispered with his last breath.

     I cried in that moment, harder than ever before. I didn’t know what it was that I understood, but I understood it. Life, my never-ending questions, they were all brought to an end with that simple statement, and I knew that ‘I’ wouldn’t ever get my end. As I saw his life, his very being leave him, I realized, I just knew.

     So I decided that I would give myself an end, that I would make it finally all alright. I sighed as I took that leap from the bridge. My last thought, my last words, “Aishiteru koi. Aishiterou (I truly love you).”