Alena and I snuggle up on her velvet quilt and browse through her Snapchat Memories (
The function of displaying the user\'s past pictures)
A photo appeared in the feed two years ago.
This is a shameless mirror selfie: The torn abs that bend her shoulders and stretch out from under the sports bra.
This is a relaxed and pleasant image, probably shot at the moment of bold self
Confident or attempting to flirt with another girl.
However, when she saw it, her face fell off instead of laughing or recalling the past.
\"I wish I was the same,\" she said . \". I turned to her.
She was wearing a similar sports bra and leaning against her elbow so that her shoulders were bent like they were in the picture.
Her cheeks were dotted with the same, frivolous dimples. I laughed.
I said, \"Baby, you still look like that . \"
She turned her eyes and I leaned over and kissed her forehead.
\"You know what I mean,\" she said, taking a look at her stomach and thighs. She was right.
Her face was a little fuller.
Her abdomen bends to her hips in a softer way than her jagged young body.
But these differences are hardly obvious.
If so, gentleness will only make her more amazing.
I felt lucky that my hand was pressed on her hip.
Despite several subtle attempts to tell her that she is now more beautiful than in the picture, I admit that my guarantee may not be any different.
I know because I played the same comparison game with my old photo.
I have almost no photos saved in my Snapchat memory.
Although I have been communicating through the app when I was a teenager, I have almost never saved a photo, and when I saved it, I didn\'t look back often.
In the years since then, my body has changed more than Alena, and I don\'t like memories.
For most of my youth, as a competitive figure skater, I have found that attention to my body and its relative size cannot be ignored.
When I was 16 years old, I left home and my parents in Arizona went to Colorado Springs for training, where I was immersed in a culture of aesthetic movement, under constant pressure of success, prosperity and suffering at the same time.
I seem to be strong and successful. I have been successful in many ways, but I am vulnerable to that old man.
My cheeks are sunken and sunken.
My collarbone stands out.
My hair is long and straight, as if I was overwhelmed by the sadness of my adolescence.
I have been suffering from eating disorders over the years and since then any photo shows a version of me that is almost empty.
In the end, I realized that I needed to recover if I wanted to keep up with the physical needs of the exercise, so I was immersed in the positive movement of the body and worked to restore my weight and strength.
The person I was in the old photo is not like me at all.
When I met Alena, I hadn\'t eaten for a long time, but still felt a pain when I met my thinner old photo.
Although I did not miss the years of self
Disgust, when I meet the mirror, it\'s hard to believe how bad the hungry people are
Selfie in my camera
The snapshot of my thin past did not show the way I would faint after exercise;
They didn\'t show my bruised skin, nor did they show the way my hair came off in a mass.
All I see when I look back at the old selfie is that when my face is thinner, the light draws my cheekbones.
Alena was the first woman I ever had a serious date.
Each of her physical milestones is memorable.
We talked in the car for hours before our first kiss.
We brushed each other\'s arms on a date but did not take action.
For months, we blush when we need to change, then leave the room privately to take off our clothes.
So that day, when we were surfing on Snapchat in our underwear, my hands trembled as they stretched from her jeans to the skin under her belt.
She\'s nervous, too.
Maybe because of my lack of experience.
She took a look and avoided my eager eyes.
Shortly after, we wore underwear and wore it on her velvet quilt to see each other\'s bodies for the first time.
When Alena realized that I could see the back of her thigh, she said, \"Don\'t look at my stretch marks.
I looked elsewhere and looked back slowly.
After a while, I had my fingers drawn down along the tortuous stretch marks at the back of her leg.
She was not nervous and pulled out, but looked awkward and could no longer seem to hide a cruel secret.
I said, \"You are so beautiful . \"
The word sounds old-fashioned.
I wish I could speak better.
I know I can\'t erase all the time that Aleena was told her body had a simple adjective \"beauty\" that was wrong.
She nodded, but I could feel her lingering discomfort.
We snuggled up for a while and tried to force ourselves to relax.
I breathe and relax in our intimacy.
After a few minutes of hugging, her phone buzzed.
She picked it up to check out Snapchat, and that\'s why we interacted with the memory function, she stared at her former self and both of us were bothered by our experience with the smaller figure.
Despite years of trying to overcome disappointment with her body, I don\'t know what to tell Alena to mitigate the flaws she feels.
She is the cutest person I have ever seen.
Her hair bounces in dark, perfect curls.
Her eyes sent out huge lashes that caught the attention of everyone around her.
Her body is athletic, female, and obviously strong.
When I noticed how well my own body matched her body, I was moved by her presence.
We measured the same length, a small 5 feet.
Our legs mirror each other.
If we don\'t have different skin tones on our thighs, it\'s likely that we won\'t be able to distinguish them.
Our stomachs are curled up, and our bodies are folded together.
I \'ve known Alena all the time, and I\'m in the same shape, but I\'m lying there in my underwear and seeing it better.
Her body is very beautiful and I haven\'t even considered how similar it is to my own body.
On her, I see how ridiculous it is to hope that there is a gap between her thighs.
I see how wasteful it is to have her hip bone sticking out of the skin.
She has a lot of features that I hate myself, but on her I found them to be awesome.
I picked up her phone and raised the old Snapchat photo she was remembering.
I said, \"I don\'t look like this . \"“No, but —” she said.
\"My body looks a lot like what you are now,\" I said . \".
I pointed to a mirror beside her bed.
She looked at the way our stomach was bent and she inevitably noticed how our legs were stretched in the same length of space.
She can\'t argue with me.
\"Do you think I should be a little smaller? ” I said. “No! Obviously not.
I said, \"then you can\'t hate your body . \"
\"It looks like mine.
\"We stare at our strange, similar selves in the mirror.
All of a sudden, our underwear is not so fragile. clad bodies.
Since we began to take off our clothes, our shoulders have released a strain.
Alena moved my hand to her thigh, where I used to track the lines of her stretch marks.
Our insecurity was not cured that day.
Sometimes social media reminds me of the days when I was thin, when my collarbone was protruding or there was a gap between my thighs, I was shown pictures of myself, the space I carved out of myself was shining with a lamp.
The photos no longer bother me because more often than not, the photos appear on my feed with Alena and I snuggle up in our sports bra.
Our stomachs are curled
Our cheeks are full.
I know behind these pictures are ice cream appointments, cooking pasta nights in our kitchen, and weekend bottles poured late at night.
We no longer want our sculptures.
Hate yourself while loving each other has become hypocritical.
Although falling in love with Alena is a love story between the two of us, falling in love with her is also a love story between my heart and body. After years of turmoil, I finally learned the peace between each other.
Karina Manta is a finalist in the essay contest at the Modern Love Academy, and this month graduated from the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.
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