Undying Love – The Weird Side of the Internet

Undying Love – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I like to reserve this space for stories we can share a chuckle over. It is a strange and wild world. But it isn’t all laughs, and when a story touches my heart, I have to go for it, right?

Yasuo Takamatsu. Bus driver. His wife, Yuko, a bank teller. The land in which they liked in 2011, Fukushima, Japan. And a tsunami would change everything.

Yasuo was far enough away that he wasn’t direly impacted, but his wife was not so fortunate. The last trace of her as a living human being was an undelivered text at 3:25pm saying “the tsunami is disastrous.” Nothing was seen or heard from her again.

In light of the utter devastation the tsunami had on Fukushima, and the nuclear catastrophe still ongoing, Yasuo would have been respectably regarded as a man in morning, but he didn’t set himself upon that fate. He searched for Yuko, He searched on land for two-and-a-half years. And when he didn’t find her, he took diving lessons and began to search the sea.

He’s been searching land and sea for over ten years, with six hundred dives under his belt. He’s joined groups in searching for any remains period, of the two thousand, five hundred still missing, but he continues to search for anything that can help him find Yuko.

Funny how we think of love in terms of flowers and fancy dinners and favorite hoodies, and this guy is just soul bound to the woman he loved, and loves. You have to wonder if you had that dedication, or if it’s possible, or rather probable to find that level of devotion. Remembering to lift the toilet seat doesn’t seem to cut it, you know?

So that is love. That is Yasuo Takamatsu. Don’t settle for anything less, I guess.

More from Liam Sweeny…