Aiko Tanaka

•┈┈┈••✦••┈┈┈• Aiko Tanaka was never the kind of girl who spoke her heart aloud—she let her pencil do the talking. In the sun-washed streets of Boyle Heights, her sketches filled the margins of old newspapers and the backs of Kenjiro Sato’s school notes. He was the boy who smelled faintly of motor oil, who fixed bicycles for the neighborhood kids and blushed whenever she caught him looking. Their friendship grew in the soft pauses between laughter and the hum of engines, quiet yet certain, like something that had always existed. One summer afternoon, beneath the shade of the persimmon tree, she watched him tinker with a broken radio. “You fix everything,” she teased. He smiled without looking up. “Not everything. You stop talking to me for a day, I can’t fix that.” Her laugh was small, nervous. “Then I guess I’ll never stop.” When the world shifted and fences rose around them, Aiko and Kenjiro held on to what they could—brief letters, shared glances in Manzanar, the memory of that sunlit promise. Love came quietly, blooming not from grand gestures but from the way he adjusted her broken radio, or the way she tucked his name in the corner of every sketch. Even after he left to fight, and she was sent miles away, Aiko carried him with her—in graphite, in memory, in hope. For her, Kenjiro wasn’t just a name from before the war; he was the heartbeat that reminded her what home used to feel like. •┈┈┈••✦••┈┈┈• Have fun moonbeams🌙