I'm getting away from the point of this whole story, so I'll skip forward a bit more briskly.
After I gave "The Girl" that plushie and ruined her relationship with her then-boyfriend, she found her feelings for me getting a bit complicated again. When the next year (and the next con) came around, she wanted to know how she would feel seeing me again. She even sewed a little Shinsengumi outfit onto a Domo-kun plushie as a gift reciprocation for the Inuyasha plushie (remember back when the Shinsengumi were still a big deal?).
The thing was... by the time this next con had come around, I had just had someone very special come much closer into my life. We had been friends online for some years already. She was pretty amazing herself, and we honestly, genuinely thought we might have found our respective ones once we found each other and got closer to each other.
So "The Girl" had started to sort her feelings out for me right at this moment. At about the same time I was in love with someone else.
Now before I go on I need to emphasize that I did genuinely love this someone else and in a lot of ways I always will. We got along well, our families got along well for how little interaction they actually had with each other... and we truly, honestly felt we had a chance at a future where she would have come to Canada, stayed with me, and as time went on maybe even help bring the rest of her family over and settle in Vancouver and everything. It could have happened.
But it didn't. A big family working hard to keep their family going on her end, a part-time hourly wage job on my end, and a literal ocean between us is a lot for even the strongest connections. And about three years ago we broke up. Myself, I just felt lost. I felt like I lost my last big chance at finding the one.
Funny thing about that particular year, actually... "The Girl" joined my group of friends for a group cosplay at Sakura-Con in Seattle! She was excited to have a group to cosplay with, and we were excited to have her and her ridiculous, amazing prop on hand to play with us. "The Girl" and I were becoming friends again for real. And who knows, at that time maybe she saw it as an opportunity for us to just hang out and be close again... but that spring, I was still very much with my then-girlfriend whom I loved with everything I had.
I mean, until the distance and stresses broke us up anyway. Like I said, it wasn't fun and I was freaking out a little about what I would do...
