Written by Matthew Celestial
There are some people who don’t just listen to your wildest ideas. They hand you the matches and tell you to light the entire thing.
That was Jeffrey.
I’d say something outrageous, half-serious, half-impossible, like launching a pharmaceutical company with no capital and nothing but a shared Google Doc. And he’d pause, smirk, tilt his head and say:
“If anyone could do it, it’d be you, Matthew.”
Then he’d laugh—not out of disbelief, but because he could already picture the absurdity of it working. He never once told me to play small. Never once made me feel like dreaming big was naive. In a world that often demands realism, Jeffrey offered the rarest thing: permission.
He believed in me with this quiet, steady conviction I never had to earn. It wasn’t loud or performative. It was just there. In the way he’d entertain my ideas without flinching. In the way he look ed at me like I might actually pull it off. And maybe that’s what I miss the most.
That kind of belief. The kind you don’t have to ask for. The kind that makes you believ e in yourself, just a little more.
We met at a summer job in our early twenties, both of us barely adults, wearing dress shirts a little too big for our frames, pretending we had it all figured out.
It was a pharmaceutical company. The kind of place where you were meant to stay in your lane, clock your hours and not ask too many questions. But Jeffrey was incapable of small thinking. He didn’t just show up for the job. He showed up with ambition, ideas and a knack for making people lean in. Th ere was something magnetic about him. Sharp, endlessly curious and never content with the obvious an swer.
I was envious of how easily brilliance sat on his shoulders. How he could convince an yone of anything, not with arrogance, but with precision. You’d be mid-debate, thinking you had him an d then he’d flash that knowing smirk that told you: you didn’t actually understand the topic well enough. And he wasn’t wrong.
We started using our Outlook calendars to schedule “meetings” that had nothing to do with work. We’d take over an empty boardroom and talk for hours, about science, about business, about lif e. We dreamt out loud. We imagined futures where we’d co-found companies, disrupt industries, do things n o one in that office ever expected of two young students with entry-level badges and oversized dreams.
Looking back, those were the first boardrooms I ever felt at home in.
Not because of the setting but because someone else saw what I saw. Not just in the world, but in me.
But like many great stories between friends, ours didn’t stay golden forever.
We had a falling out—loud at first, then quiet in its absence. Not the kind of rupture th at comes from betrayal or some dramatic goodbye, but from slow drift, misunderstandings, pride and time. But also a deep-rooted heartbreak that he’d maturely say, “it’s no one’s fault. Just the way things are.”
Just the way things are. It’s strange how distance can grow even when both nothing and something specific is said. And how sometimes, the very people who once made you feel most seen can also become mirrors you’re afraid to look into. Just another stranger. One day became two days, and soon enough, I’d imagine the day, I’d see him be successful and I was just a fly on the wall.
We stopped talking. Years went by.
At first, I convinced myself I was fine with that. Life was busy. I had businesses to build, fires to put out, people to prove wrong. But there was always something unsettled. A missing piece I didn’t allow myself to name.
When he passed away last year, I didn’t cry right away. I told myself that I did enough of that five years ago. That people grow apart. That it was complicated. That I had already done the mourning.
But the grief didn’t ask for permission. It came anyway: in waves, in silence, in those strange moments of stillness when you finally let your guard down. And underneath it all was this aching question: What did we lose by not finding our way back to each other?
I think what hurt most wasn’t just losing Jeffrey. It was realizing that someone who had once believed in every outrageous dream I had—who had sat in empty rooms with me, building castles in the sky—was suddenly…gone. No closure. No clean ending. Just the haunting truth that belief alone isn’t always enough to keep people close.
And yet—his belief in me never left. Even when he did.
In the months after Jeffrey’s passing, I found myself thinking not just about who he was—but about who I was when he was in my life.
He challenged me. Not always gently. But always sincerely. He made me sharper. Bolder. He had this gift of laughing at my wildest ideas while still pushing me to make them real. That kind of faith in someone, it marks you.
There’s something disorienting about realizing that a person you drifted from still shaped you in ways you hadn’t fully grasped. After all, he was part of my origin story. The spark in the early days of believing I could actually build something. The first person to tell me, without irony or hesitation, “If anyone could do it, it’s you.”
And maybe that’s what stays with me most. Not just the memories. But the permission he gave me to be audacious.
These days, when I find myself at a crossroads, when the fear kicks in, when I wonder if the dream is too big or the world too cold, I hear his voice. Smirking, probably. Half-joking. “You’re really gonna try that?” And then, without missing a beat: “Good. You should.”
I think Jeffrey gave me a compass. Not one that points north, but one that points forward. That reminds me to keep going. To stay curious. To stay ridiculous in my hope.
Some people leave behind a legacy. Some, lineage.
Jeffrey left behind direction. And I’m still following it.
There are people you lose, and then there are people you carry.
Jeffrey is someone I carry.
Not with the heaviness of regret, but with the warmth of memory. The kind that doesn’t fade, it just changes shape. Becomes quieter. Becomes part of your voice when you speak to yourself kindly. Part of the fire when you dare to begin again.
We never got the chance to patch things up. That will always hurt. But I’ve come to believe that healing can happen even in the absence of resolution. That love doesn’t have to be loud or linear. Sometimes, it’s just a throughline—a whisper that never leaves you.
And this… this essay, this moment, this breath, is part of my thank you.
Thank you for every inside joke, every long walk, every sharp debate that left me smarter than before. Thank you for treating my wild ideas like they were worth something. Thank you for pushing me when I doubted myself. And even more for laughing when I took myself too seriously.
You taught me that belief doesn’t have to be extravagant. It just has to be real. And you believed in me before I even knew how to believe in myself. I hope, wherever you are, you know I never stopped being grateful. And I hope I make you proud, not with the wins or the titles or the noise, but with how I keep going. How I keep building. How I still dream audaciously.
Because if anyone could do it?
Maybe it is me.
And maybe—somewhere—you’re still saying that, too.
