30 For 30 — Day 16: People You Can Be You With

30 Days.
30 Photos.
30 Lessons.

Lesson 16: People You Can Be You With

I am comfortable in some form or fashion around most people that I surround myself with. There are few that I can be around for 0.5 seconds and immediately fall back into where we were 1 month, 1 year, or 1 decade ago.

I cherish and love the friends I gained in college. I am lucky to still be incredibly close with people from high school. I keep in touch with many folks from middle school…but there is only a handful of humans that it is truly easy to be myself completely around. To be weird, inappropriate, loud, quiet, childish, angry, sad, happy, scared, more weird, confident, nervous, super weird around.

I met Josh in 1996 when my family moved from Mississippi to North Carolina. He lived 5 houses down in the neighborhood and our moms started playing Bunko (don’t ask — if you know, you know) together and we were about 18 months apart in age and became close friends. We went to different schools and we stayed close. We moved to different neighborhoods and we stayed close. We went to different colleges and we stayed close. We moved to different cities and we are still close. He is my brother in everything but blood.

I can list out a hundred things that I could say or do and it would make us start to bend over with laughter.
“Please cheese”
“Goooodddd goooooddd”
“GEORGE IS COMING”
I’m not going to list 97 more….there’s probably not 100…but at least 17. You get my point. Shut up.

You have no idea what the hell I am talking about with those quotes, but Josh does. I love that.
I have that kind of relationship with a handful of people but the one with Josh has been the longest and for that reason it is by far the easiest to fall back into.

His parents are my second parents. His brother and sister are my third and fourth siblings. I remember the addresses of his old houses. I remember the phone number of his old landline and probably forever will.

That is a comfort that I am blessed to have. As of the last year or so I think we started talking on the phone and facetiming more. Do we talk about anything in particular? Hell no. Sometimes we talk about the wild turkeys that lurked outside his old office. Sometimes we talk about the time we used an old t-shirt to whip a sand crab off a dune, only to be scolded by an old woman who was about to call PETA or some shit. Sometimes we are on facetime and sit there in silence for multiple minutes while one of us plays video games. Why not? It’s great.

We’ve fought each other, hugged each other, celebrated each other, laughed with each other, been silent with each other, swam in creeks, found hundreds of golf balls, done battle with snakes in the woods, explored forests behind our houses, gifted each other the same 15lb rock for 5 years in a row (there is no special story — we literally wrapped a rock in a box and paper and gave it to each other back and forth for about 5 years), watched countless movies, killed countless aliens in Halo, invented ping pong games that would exhaust the most accomplished marathon runners, throw ninja stars in basements, fed grasshoppers to spiders in their webs, drawn 100+ square long hopscotch courses that spanned the entirety of a driveway, had dunk contests (at 7ft high rims), made GIANT snowmen, sledded stupid stuff, fallen off skateboards at Mach 3, hunted for lost torpedos in the local pool, invented, created, admired, and accomplished it all. Yet there’s still more to come.

It’s a genuine blessing, just like being placed with my college friends in our random dorm, to be placed 5 houses down in 1996 from someone who I would eventually call my brother.

Josh is married now and has a new best friend. Bastard. But I take comfort in the fact that whenever his incredibly smart Doctor wife is off saving lives and Josh wants to be weird and funny, that perhaps I will be the first person he calls. We got each other’s back forever because we have always been our truest selves around each other. As 4 and 6 year-olds we didn’t know how to be anything else but ourselves…and that mentality has stuck as we aged. Lucky us.

Find your people, people. They’ll never lead ya astray.

Giddyup,
Pat