Do you love mewhen I lose?

Let me tell you something that happened to me.

I was in Thessaloniki. A chess tournament.

I'm standing in a hallway. It smells like coffee and chalk.

Next to me, a mother. Watching a door.

Behind that door is her daughter, about to sit down across a chessboard and be judged.

And then she tells me something. Quietly, like she didn't want anyone else to hear it.

“Do you know what she asked me, right before she went in?”

I pause.

Because I recognized the question.

I stopped breathing. Not because I was surprised. Because I recognized the question.

I'd asked it too. Just never out loud.

Maybe you know it too. Not from chess. From somewhere else. A performance review, a stage, a relationship where you kept trying to earn something that should already have been yours.

That night, I sat down and wrote.

That night I sat down and wrote the answer. As a song. In English — because back then, I believed I couldn't write feeling in Greek. Strange, since the family it was for was Greek down to the bone.

The song said one sentence. Just one.

The people we love still need to hear it.

Here's what I think we get wrong, all of us. We assume the people we love already know it. We think: they know, so I don't have to say it. But that's not true.

We need to hear it. Not once. Again and again.

So don't let another day pass assuming. Say it out loud.

I love you. I see you. I appreciate you.

You matter to me — not because of what you do, not because of what you achieve. Just because you exist.

It was true. It was just wearing the wrong clothes.

A year passed. I listened to it again. Something no longer sat right. It was true — it was just wearing the wrong clothes. So I rewrote it. Same truth. This time in Greek.

And something moved that the English version had never touched.

It wasn't a better translation. It was the same love, finally speaking the language their heart understands.

Here's the truth I kept from all of it, like a small stone in my pocket: