Alright, I'll concede one thing about my process of falling out of love with "The Girl": it wasn't completely a "just kinda happened" thing. I had had lunch with a friend during 3rd year who sort of casually slip that "The Girl" actually had a boyfriend. Years and years later I would learn that come 3rd year, "The Girl" had finally figured out how to balance a work/school schedule and personal life, and when a colleague of hers asked, she said yes. Like I said, she was very practically out of my life already, so to hear that kinda irked me a bit but didn't really hurt or anything. But yeah, it definitely helps to get over someone when you learn they've already gotten over you, hey?

So some years pass, and suddenly I'm going to the local anime convention in the summer. Cosplay was still scary and awkward, I still cared about Naruto forehead protectors... and come one year, I ran into "The Girl" at one. It wasn't too surprising I suppose; turns out, the Science Undergraduate Society was pretty into anime and stuff (and probably still is, I'm sure), and a whole bunch of them seemed to be coming out to the cons too.

The convention itself, Anime Evolution, was at the time still very small and worked out of a relatively small and isolated university campus on top of a mountain. It was hard to miss people over the course of three days. Well, I reckoned that after running into "The Girl" that first day, I had a very nice opportunity to relieve my room of one little decoration that I had never meant to keep for as long as I had.

At some point after I learned where all the stores that sold anime merch were around town, I finally found an Inuyasha plushie I had meant to give "The Girl" for her birthday (Inuyasha was still big way back when, you'll recall). After I got it, of course, was the school year that "The Girl" started Co-op at a place she would later work at for several years. The point was, I never did give her that damn plushie, and for at least a year or two I just had this damn thing sitting in my room, on my shelf of other figs and memorabilia. If I wanted to get symbolic, I could say it was a physical piece of my lingering feelings on all of this stuff and its being in my room was going to keep me from moving on or something.

I probably never thought that hard about it. Point is, the next day of con I tracked her down, gave her the plushie, said "Happy birthday," and then walked away with a bit of a dramatic flourish. It felt good.

What I didn't know and what I wouldn't have known for years and years after was that after I turned around and started walking away, I had immediately complicated "The Girl's life drastically in that one moment. She had apparently gotten very flustered and emotional... her boyfriend who saw me give her this token got agitated and defensive... and before he could get to her to do anything, she bolted away and around the corner of the hallway.

I had unwittingly planted the seed that would have those two break up months after. It's easy to look back and see the humour in it all, but yeahhhh... so that happened...