My best friend in the entire world is a guy named Louis Wadsworth Mattis III. Tripp and I met in elementary school when he moved to Memphis in 2004, but I don't really remember much of him before 6th grade. My earliest memory of Tripp is the two of us hanging out by the pool at the hotel during the 6th grade father-son trip to St. Louis that my school did every year. I say hanging out, but it was more me being a dick to him and trying to push him into the pool a lot.
I still have a hard time believing that's what I was actually doing; I have a suspicion that I'm misremembering. Not to say I wasn't capable of being a dick to people in elementary school. Oh no, I was a terrible child. Come to think of it, I was probably a huge bully. No, the reason I question my memory is that I don't see how I could have been such a jerk to him in 6th grade, and yet I have a picture of the two of us as best friends in 8th grade.
Well, however we became friends, there's no denying that we did. And I'm closer to him than any other person on Earth. Tripp is the only person I know who I am equally comfortable talking to as I am sitting in silence. I have some friends around whom I always feel I need to keep the conversation going, friends I feel are in some way or another better than me, so I have to justify my presence around them by always having something to say: friends like Annaliese. And then I have other friends, friends that I'm comfortable being around in silence if we're both doing something: friends like Wyatt. But Tripp is unique. There are no uncomfortable silences between us. We can sit in silence with nothing going on, lost in our own thoughts, and it's not weird or awkward at all.
Tripp is also the only person with whom I feel comfortable sharing anything. Well, there are like one or two things about me that I've never told another living soul. but other than that I can talk to Tripp about anything. It's not like I don't trust other people. There are guys like Davo and Phil who have been discipling me over the years, and I can share my struggles with them, but I wouldn't walk into Phil's office and tell him that my desk calendar is still on March because I haven't been able to get to it because of all the clutter on my desk. That's too trivial. But I have no reservations about calling Tripp up right now and telling him that. That's just the way we work.
In retrospect, he's probably been a better friend to me that I've been to him. Especially in the last year or so, he's opened up to me about a lot of the issues he's been having, and I haven't really opened up to him. It's not that I'm afraid to, I just never did. And I think it gave him the false sense that I was infallible, that I had it all worked out, which isn't true at all. And, whether this actually played out in reality or not, I got the idea that our friendship was suffering because of it. And that terrified me. See, I understand that all good relationships have conflict. When two people are close to each other they're going to rub up against each other; it's healthy, and it usually makes the relationship stronger. But Tripp and I never really came into conflict about anything. We're both pretty chill people. So when this (likely imagined) conflict arose, I over reacted because I wasn't used to conflict in the relationship.
This past year has been hard. We're at different schools, and we haven't been able to hang out as much, which is a major reason I'm excited to be working in Memphis this summer. Hopefully we remain friends and what happened between Chip and me doesn't happen to the two of us (don't get me started on Chip; that's a whole other story) because Tripp's my best friend, and I don't know what I'd do or who I'd be with out him.
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