The Words I Could Never Say Out Loud

I have always trusted language, except when it came to you.

Words behave when I write them down, but around you they scatter, like birds startled by my own hesitation. I have spent years rehearsing the syntax of "thank you" and "I’m sorry," only to have the words dissolve in the heat of my own pride the moment I face you. This is my attempt to gather them again.

People like to throw around the phrase unconditional love as if it were a skill you can learn early, like riding a bike or memorizing song lyrics. Lovers claim it at the height of infatuation. The younger generation swears they would die for someone they met three months ago, as if devotion were proven through dramatic hypotheticals.

I used to think love was transactional. I am good, therefore I am loved. I succeed, therefore I am worthy. Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that love must be earned daily, like wages. And yet, every time I failed, when my grades slipped, when my choices disappointed, when my nod of silence replaced gratitude, you were still there. Not negotiating. Not keeping score. Just there. That’s when I realized that I have felt unconditional love, everyday, for the past 26 years of my life on this earth.

To My father, You never said it outright, but you lived it in the way you stepped aside so I could step forward. There is a specific, lonely nobility in being a father. You are perhaps the only man in this frantic, competitive world who looks at me and truly, desperately wants me to be better than you were. Not richer. Not more praise. Better. I apologize for the times I mistook your guidance for interference. I didn't realize that your correction was a form of prayer. A way of saying, “Please, do not trip over the same stones that broke my feet”

And to my Mother: How do I apologize for the sheer audacity of my existence? You are the only person on this planet who would (and did) use one hundred percent of your mind and body as a shield. I think about the biology of it often: how I once shared your blood, how I literally took the calcium from your bones to build my own. You gave me the literal framework to stand, and then you spent the next two decades making sure the world didn't knock me down. While the rest of the world offers a love that is conditional on my success, you offer a love that is a fixed geographic point. I could go north, south, or off the map entirely, and your love would still be the lighthouse.

We romanticize the "dying for love" trope because it is easy. Dying is a singular, dramatic moment. But living for someone, waking up every day for 10, 20, 30 years and choosing to put their hunger before your own, their future before your comfort, that is the real romance. That is the only unconditional love that exists. Spouses may part, friends may fade, and the "forever" of youth is often just a season long. But the love of a parent is the only debt that can never be fully repaid, It is a loan with zero interest and a lifetime term.

I did not realize how rare that was.

This is the part where I admit my greatest failure: I assumed you would always know. That you knew I was grateful. That you knew I loved you. That my silence was simply my nature, not my negligence. But love, even unconditional love, deserves acknowledgment. This is me admitting that I didn’t know how to say these things without feeling exposed. I didn’t know how to sound sincere without feeling awkward. I didn’t know how to be soft without worrying it would make me smaller. So I stayed quiet. And in that quiet, I missed chances to love you back out loud.

If this sounds like an apology dressed as affection, it is because both are true. Loving you has been the easiest thing I never learned how to say. So I write instead. I write to make up for dinners eaten without conversation, for calls not returned fast enough, for pride that kept my gratitude trapped behind my teeth.

Even though I’m not that six-year-old boy getting ready for football practice anymore, I still feel like him sometimes. And I know you still see me as him too every now and then, no matter how deep my voice gets. Maybe, just maybe, it is that 6-year-old kid who’s pushing me to write this.  Because I know, damn well, he’s braver about these things than I am. He says I love you without rehearsing. He says I’m sorry without pride getting in the way.

I did not realize how rare that was.