This piece was written in dedication to my partner, Ryla Elizabeth Gray.

We met in the spring of 2025 while taking a public speaking class together at Hillsborough College’s Ybor City campus. We did not talk much during the first couple months of the class, but eventually, after delivering our speeches, we suddenly had things to talk about. And it did not take long before we realized we had much more to talk about: shared interests, passions, beliefs, and humor. Within a few weeks, we were on our first date, and the rest is history.

About a month after we started seeing each other, I felt compelled to write something. I had not felt so strongly about someone before, and because of that, I was inspired. Within a few weeks, this piece was born.

This is also the piece that caused me to take composition substantially more seriously.

Composition had always been my great passion in music. In fact, only a few years earlier, I had been accepted to study music composition at the Boston Conservatory. I took a few classes there, but ultimately had to leave because of financial issues. That is always the problem for us musicians, isn’t it? Money. Despite being accepted to several great schools, even with strong scholarships, I did not come from the kind of family background that could make those opportunities financially realistic.

And among musical disciplines, composition is likely one of the most tumultuous of all. Piano, on the other hand, was clearer. There is never a lack of demand for good pianists, and teaching is often a fruitful venture for pianists as well. So I decided to lean more heavily in that direction. I came home to Tampa from Boston in the summer of 2024 and began studying piano performance at the Hillsborough College for Performing Arts with Kenneth Hanks.

By the spring of 2025, I was treating composition more as a hobby, with vague plans of making it a professional venture later in my career. Then, while I was in one of the practice rooms writing this piece at the piano, my private jazz piano teacher, Simon Lasky, came in. He did not know that I composed. As it turned out, he was quite an accomplished composer himself, and he became curious.

He asked me to play what I had written, and he was stunned. I remember the smile on his face and the surprise in his expression. He even asked me to show him more scores of music I had written, almost to see whether this was some kind of “one-off miracle.” To his conclusion, it was not.

In that moment, he did something I had not truly received as a composer from many other professional musicians: he recognized genuine potential. I had worked with several great musicians, and I had always received admirable support from friends and family, but never had I been truly recognized by an accomplished composer in that way.

From that moment on, he was no longer simply my jazz instructor. Our studies shifted toward composition. I made great strides with him, and his belief and encouragement inspired me to take composition more seriously. He made me promise not to set composition aside, because in his words, that would be a waste of great talent and potential.

And so this work will always be special to me for that reason. It will always remind me not only of experiencing true love for the first time, but also of the moment in my life when it became clear that I was not merely chasing dreams and fantasy.

I was beginning to see my future.