An open letter to my best friend.

Who this is has always been a little up in the air...

It was Tyler growing up.
It was Brendan when nobody else liked me.
It was Mark in High School.
It was Jimmy on my mission.
It was Adam in college.
Then Jason.
Yancy in New York.
Ben in Boston.

All in all I think I most often say Jason. Way to curb the rest of the pack, bro.

J-

Thanks for always being such a great friend to me. In the particular time that I met you, I wasn't aware how much I would need a new friend. It wasn't long after we met though, that I realized we were almost more like brothers than friends. Whenever people ask how we met we relate a dorky story about a KBYU pledge drive and how you grew up in Washington with Death Cab for Cutie and I grew up in Phoenix with Jimmy Eat World, and how we both totally loved We Have The Facts and We're Voting Yes and Clarity and listened to them all the time. And it was audiogeek love at first sound.

But while that's a fun story, I've realized that in friendship, (as with Love) common interests matter a lot less than we initially think. You quickly proved to have the quality I most admire and most strive for in my own relationships... loyalty. Your friendship was never conditional on anything. I'm a bit of a sinner. I struggle with a lot of things that other people find easier. Toward the end of my 3rd year at BYU I had my first "encounter" with depression. That was a tough adjustment for me and for most of the people I called my friends. All of my relationships changed somewhat. With Adam. With Emily. With Jen. I don't think anything really changed with us though. You were supportive and kind as you always had been and I never felt any undue judgement when you gave advice. I felt like you knew who I really was and you expressed almost effortlessly that I shouldn't settle for being less than that. When I left Provo for New York, there was a lot of things I missed and a lot of things I didn't. You and Adam topped the list of people I missed profoundly. When I came to Boston I made a lot of really good friends in a hurry. It was weird. I was riding some kind of high from doing something scary and unprecedented and simultaneously knowing it was the right thing for me to do. Boston was now my home and I was having a lot of success in making it so. For better or for worse, living in Boston changed most of my other friendships. I'm not as close with most of my friends back West as I used to be. I've been out of their lives for so long.

I knew you were going through a rough patch at home, when you came out to Boston for a vacation... in December. But aren't you glad you did... I count it one of the greatest moments of my life when I saw you and Pugs at Average Joe's and realized, "Holy crap... they might actually be totally perfect for each other!" You were. It was a high for me to attend your sealing, and I totally love you kids to pieces. You're the best couple I've ever known. I miss you all the time.

One more thing. Thanks for helping me pull my head out of another part of me enough to see what trying to be with Annie was doing to me. You never told me she was crap for me (even though she was), you just pointed me back to my self. Once I started seeing me again, it became clear that we were just plain meant for other people. A relationship takes work anyway and that one would have been an awful lot more work to save than to just cut our losses. At this distance, hindsight is better than 20-20 and I see perfectly that it wasn't much of a loss for either of us to go forward and find someone else.

I regularly wish you were here to rock out with, to work on recording projects with, to dance to Canned Heat with, and just talk to. Thanks for your friendship. It means a tremendous amount to me and I freaking love ya, brother. Rock, rock on.


Yes cup.