TO EVERYONE I HAVE EVER LOVED
I wish you could have seen my heart beneath the intensity.
This is for everyone I have ever loved.
Some of you are still here.
Some of you are far away.
Some of you and I stopped speaking somewhere along the way.
Some of you built lives that no longer include me.
And some of you are gone from this world entirely.
I have been thinking about all of you.
Not as characters in my story. Not as lessons. Not as people who were supposed to stay forever.
As people I loved.
People who loved me.
People who knew versions of me that nobody else will ever know.
And there is something I wish I had known how to say when you were standing closer to me.
I wish you could have seen my heart.
I wish you could have understood what was underneath all that seriousness.
I wish you knew why I could become so intense.
Because the truth is, I have apparently been this way for almost as long as I can remember.
When I was a kid, I would get an idea in my head and I couldn’t just leave it there.
I had to make it real.
Before I had real recording equipment, I recorded songs onto tapes.
Then I played beats through a boombox and recorded them through the microphone of a computer.
I burned my first CD when I was about eleven years old.
I called the album The Time Is Now.
I even glued a homemade paper label onto the CD because, in my little mind, if I had made an album, then it needed to be a real album.
The damn thing ended up getting stuck in the CD player in the car.
I laugh thinking about it now.
But I also understand that kid better today than I ever have.
He could see something in his head and could not rest until somebody else could experience it.
That has followed me my entire life.
Different things.
Different mediums.
Different stakes.
Same kid.
I see something that I believe should exist, and something inside me becomes unwilling to stop until it exists outside of me too.
I didn’t know that was unusual.
I didn’t even have words for it.
It was just how I was.
Even playing hockey, people remember how hard I played. How serious I became. How angry I could get when something wasn’t right.
There was always some picture inside of me of what something could be, what it should be, how hard we could play, how much better we could do it.
And the distance between what I could see and what was actually happening could make my entire body tense.
That little boy grew up.
The things he cared about became bigger.
And so did the consequences of that intensity.
I wish I had understood that sooner.
Because there were times when what was happening inside of me and what the people I loved were experiencing from me were two completely different things.
Inside of me, I might have been thinking:
This matters.
You matter.
Our life matters.
I know what this could become.
Please understand how serious I am about making it real.
But what you may have felt was pressure.
Or frustration.
Or anger.
Or that I was somewhere else even when I was standing beside you.
Maybe you wondered why I couldn’t just relax.
Maybe you wondered why everything had to matter so damn much.
Maybe sometimes it seemed like I was fighting you when, inside my own mind, I thought I was fighting for something.
That distinction does not erase the way something may have felt to you.
I know that now.
Intent doesn’t magically remove impact.
And love does not automatically mean we always know how to love each other well.
But there is something I desperately wish you had known:
When I was intense, it was rarely because you mattered too little.
Most of the time it was because everything I loved mattered too much.
I did not know how to carry that much seriousness gracefully.
Sometimes I still don’t.
I was always trying to close some enormous distance between the world that existed and the world I could see.
And somewhere along that road I became distant from people I never intended to become distant from.
That’s one of the hardest things for me to admit.
Because I never looked at the people I loved and thought, I don’t need you.
I never thought human connection was disposable.
I never thought accomplishments could replace people.
Quite the opposite.
So much of what I wanted to build was because I wanted there to be something beautiful on the other side that we could experience together.
But journeys have a strange way of convincing you:
Just finish this part.
Just survive this season.
Just solve this problem.
Just get the thing standing.
Then you’ll have time.
Then you’ll explain.
Then everybody will understand.
Then you’ll come back.
And then you look up.
Years have moved.
People have changed.
Some doors have closed.
Some people aren’t alive anymore.
And there are things you would give almost anything to say one more time.
I miss people.
I miss people who knew me before any of this.
I miss voices.
I miss rooms.
I miss stupid jokes.
I miss people whose names I haven’t spoken in years but whose faces I can still see perfectly.
I miss versions of life that can never exist again.
And I miss people from my adult life too.
People I loved deeply.
People who mattered tremendously to me even when maybe my behavior did not always make that easy to see.
There are people I wish I could sit across from now without defending myself, without arguing about what happened, without proving who was right.
I would just want to tell them:
You mattered to me.
You still do.
I was serious about you.
I was serious about us.
I wish I had known how to let you see the softness underneath all of that intensity.
I wish I had known that sometimes being understood requires more than having good intentions.
You have to say the thing.
You have to stop working long enough to look somebody in the eyes.
You have to make the love as real and experienceable as everything else you are determined to bring into the world.
That may be one of the biggest things I am learning.
I have spent my life turning invisible things into things other people can experience.
Songs.
Ideas.
Moments.
Systems.
Stories.
Whatever was inside me, I wanted to make it real.
But perhaps I sometimes assumed love was different.
I thought people would simply know.
I thought they could see it underneath everything.
I thought they understood what they meant to me.
Maybe some did.
Maybe some didn’t.
Maybe some needed me to make that love tangible too.
So that is what I am doing now.
This letter is me making it tangible.
To every person I have ever loved:
Thank you.
Thank you for knowing me in whatever chapter you knew me.
Thank you for the rides, the conversations, the arguments, the meals, the late nights, the laughter, the ordinary Tuesdays, the moments I didn’t realize would become precious later.
Thank you for believing in me when you did.
Thank you for forgiving me when you did.
Thank you for whatever piece of your life you let overlap with mine.
If I hurt you, I am sorry for the hurt.
If my intensity ever made you feel small when what I actually felt was enormous love, I wish I had known how to communicate that better.
If my distance ever made you believe I had forgotten you, I hadn’t.
And if life has taken us in completely different directions, I don’t need you to come back for any of this to be true.
This isn’t a demand.
It isn’t an invitation carrying some hidden obligation.
It isn’t me rewriting what happened between us.
It’s simply something I should have said.
Something true.
I loved you.
I love many of you still.
And I am grateful that for some amount of time, in this impossibly short life, we got to know each other.
I understand that little kid with the homemade CD more clearly now.
He saw something inside himself and wanted other people to experience it.
Apparently I never stopped doing that.
So here is something else that has been inside me for a long time.
I don’t want to leave it in there anymore.
You mattered to me.
You were never incidental to the journey.
And wherever you are now—whether we speak every day, haven’t spoken in years, or you’re somewhere I cannot reach anymore—
I hope somehow you know:
My heart was always much softer than my intensity made it look.
I was serious because I cared.
I kept going because I believed.
And beneath all the noise, all the work, all the mistakes, all the distance and all the years—
I loved you.
I still do.
— BJ
