To Self - Love, Camera, and Social Media

Alice gets up from her bed and wipes her tears with the already-soaked napkin. She finally opens the laptop after weeks of keeping it under the bed. The photo of her and Jacob flashed as the laptop fully opened.

“Hello Jacob,” she whispers as her eyes fill yet again with tears.

She didn’t open the laptop, check her phone, or go outside since the last night she saw him, so she didn’t talk to anyone, and it was finally time. She blows the dust off the laptop’s keyboard and starts typing. She replies to some of the messages that her friends send her, and she quickly realizes that everyone has the same questions for her. Typing the same things, over and over again, brings the pain back, stronger every time.

“I want to answer to everyone, and to free myself of what I feel and think,” she thinks.

After a few more minutes of thinking and replying to messages, she decides to write a post, about everything that happened, about what she feels, and really, about true love.

“As some may know, Jacob is no longer in my life. Who was Jacob for me? I could answer the question quickly and simply by saying “my boyfriend”, but that wouldn’t be completely correct. Jacob has been my best friend, my lover, and the person I cared for and loved the most in the whole world for the last many years of my life. He was always there for me, and I was always there for him. Oh, how it feels to love and be loved. Knowing that every day, when you wake up, there’s someone there, waiting for you to open your eyes so they can talk to you.

The day I met Jacob was the day I met myself. As I started to love him, I started to love myself. I found out that I can be affectionate, I can be funny, I can be smart, and I can be helpful to others, all the things I thought couldn’t be. That’s when I realized that I got something that millions of people search for all their lives, true love.

What is true love? I believe it’s loving others, and loving yourself. Life would be so sad if I didn’t love those around me; and even sadder if I wouldn’t love myself. True love was Jacob, and true love am I. But I lost him.

I lost the person I believed would be by my side until my last day. I lost the person I wanted to be next to when he would be old and forget my name. And now you might ask yourself: “Why did you break up if you loved each other so much?”. Well, we didn’t get the chance to even break up because someone else made this decision for us. Death decided to intervene and take him away.

Jacob, I love you, but I also love myself, so I have to let you go. You taught me `loving`, and now I’m teaching myself `living`.”