Yours

January 2nd

Dear Sophia,

I love you.

I was there again today just in case. I didn’t really expect you to be back. I’m not quite sure how it works with bank holidays at the start of the year but it makes sense for you to be off for a few days anyway. I just hope I can see you this week. I don’t want a whole week of this year to pass before we’ve been together. It was easier to take at the end of last year because that year was going away. This year is here now and I want it to get off to the best start possible.

Sometimes when I can’t see you I wish I had facebook so I could check you were ok. I don’t mean I don’t trust you. It’s not that I want to know what you’re up to I just want to know you’re ok. I bet there are loads of people who see you on facebook who don’t actually know you at all. I bet guys look at pictures of you and wish they had you. That’s why I could never go on there now. I wouldn’t want people looking at me. I wouldn’t want people assuming what I was like just from little things they’ve seen on there. Nobody would really understand what I’m like and I don’t want them thinking wrong things about me.

Nothing on a screen is really that real. I don’t think seeing you on there would be that comforting anyway. It’d be weird to look at pictures of you when we’re not together. It wouldn’t be like the real thing. It wouldn’t make me feel closer to you because the photos wouldn’t be of when we were together. The photos would be taken at places where I wasn’t. If there was a picture of you in an office I wouldn’t be able to look at it and feel closer to you because I don’t work in an office with you. It would be pointless.

I think people live through the internet too much anyway. They only do things off the internet to be able to go on the internet and say they’ve done it. I’ve read so many stories on the internet where I didn’t know why the person had put them up. When you watch videos of bands playing live all you can see is loads and loads of lights from people recording things on their phones. It’s like they don’t realise it’s really happening right in front of them.

I think about it quite a lot. I think it shows how much much people need to feel important.

Superheroes help people escape how hard their own lives are. Maybe they like thinking secretly they could be a superhero. Then soaps help people by being like real life but much more dramatic. It means people can get in from work and think at least their family hasn’t died in a big fire or something. The internet makes it all even weirder though. When facebook and everything started it changed things. People put up photos of what they’re doing while they’re doing it. They look at photos of what everyone else is doing and it’s like nothing is really happening unless there are photos of it everyone can see. I think now on twitter you can just literally copy what other people say. You can only type a sentence or two of your own anyway but people still feel the need to forward on exactly what someone else has said. It’s like nobody wants to actually have their own thoughts. They just want to copy someone else who they think is cool or has done something good. They think it reflects well on them. They want to comment on a photo of something good happening and then they feel like they were there too. I just don’t get it.

When I was at university a lecturer said that an unexamined life was not worth living. He said that’s why it was important to read the diaries of people who existed when important things were happening. He was saying it was just as important to understand their personal viewpoints on themselves and what was around them as it was to understand the big wars and things. That always stuck in my head. I think it means there’s no point living your life unless you really think about it while you’re living it. Otherwise you just go on day to day and you can not even realise what you’re doing while you’re doing it. People don’t want to have to think about what they’re doing though. They let other people do it for them. It means they feel like they can measure their success by how many comments they have on photos and stuff like that.

None of that matters to me though. I don’t need any of that fake stuff. I have you and that’s enough for me. I don’t need to show off about it. I don’t need other people letting me know I’m doing ok. That’s one of the most exciting things about being with you. We could show off how great things are but we don’t need to. It’s our own special thing.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew