Two years went by in a flash when one spent them unpacking emotional baggage and navigating coming-of-age existential crisis in the form of heart-to-heart talks mulling over tropes and plot points of their newest reads, mulling the cliches in fictional love stories in light of their own lives. He learnt about her family, and she his. He learnt about her fears and insecurities and she got familiar to every inch of his. He didn't know comics could be used this way, a way that was somehow therapeutic. It might have something to do with him overthinking everything and her letting him pick titles for her to translate, suffering through his long-winded explanation on why a dialogue was convincing for that character and that author couldn't handle proper character development arcs.

In the blur of assignments, midterms, semester projects, and finals, their shared collections grew, and so did they.

Graduation rolled around the corner quickly.

When his gang presented him with a graduation gift with a mischievous lilt on their lips, they didn't know that they were waiting for a prank that should never deliver. He opened the overdecorated box cautiously with a not-so-slight wondering on what they might have in store this time, hoping they would at least settle on something that would not stain his only formal clothes or get his newly-official diploma invalidated.

The gaudy monstrosity revealed a brilliant array of colors spread on many, many small paperbacks depicting guys in various poses and states of undress. One of his friends had thought it was a good idea to give him BL comics and they were now eager to see how he would react. Instead of giving them the horrified expression he was sure they had hoped for, perhaps accompanied with "girlish screams of denials " that his taste in Japanese comics "wasn't like that", he threw his arms on his friends' shoulders, gathered them in a half-hug, and thanked them sincerely with a big smile on his face.

He laughed a real hearty laugh as they grew more and more confused. From the side of his eyes, he caught her at the end of the corridor toting her own diploma and gave her a wink.

(They browsed the collection together later that day; commenting on the more ridiculous ones wondering how his friends managed to procure them, taking delight in how his friends had somehow hit several right notes and packed something he really liked, digging some unexpected gems, her reveling in the small batches she would like to scanlate. By midnight, they were lying exhausted on the floor, riding high in giddiness and all the emotional fireworks, with books strewn across the room. His jaws were slack from laughing all day. He swung his arm on her shoulders and she leaned in. She grinned. He grinned. They came together in a victorious fist bump.)

Being twenty-two and feeling like it was the end of an era hadn't come easy, and it was as if he shouldn't be this content, but he had the last laugh and he wouldn't have traded it with anything else in the world.

It was perfect.