Equinox

As of midnight of September 21st, my best friend Trey has joined me in the ranks of 27 year-olds. Pretty silly age if you ask me. I want to say the last time we really gave a shit about our birthday was when we turned 21; since then birthdays have been pretty dumb.

For how unlike one another Trey and I are, we do share some strange similarities. A boring, un-superstitious person like myself would consider them to be complete coincidence. But if I were of a different mind, it wouldn’t take a whole lot for me to think our kinship was written in the stars.

Just as a couple examples: (1) both of our first names are four letters long; both of our middle names are six letters long; both of our last names are seven letters long. Kind of cool, right?

What’s more cool is that (2) my birthday is March 20th — the day of the Spring Equinox — and his is September 21st — the day of the Fall Equinox. Those are the only two days out of the year where there are exactly 12 hours of daylight, and exactly 12 hours of darkness.

Anyway, these things are random. They don’t really mean anything. But when you are kids, and Trey and I have known each other since we were 13 or 14, those random things that don’t really mean anything actually do mean something. And for whatever reason the two of us were pretty dead set on being best friends from the very beginning. I don’t remember how or when it happened. I don’t know if he remembers how or when it happened. I don’t think that particularly matters.

Trey and I have been there for each other. There hasn’t been anyone like him in my life, and likewise I haven’t supported anyone like I’ve supported him. There is that whole thing about relationships, and taking people for granted, and how after a while the guy in a relationship stops doing the things that made the girl like him in the first place. And that’s real shit. I know I’m using an analogy to guys and girls, which doesn’t directly relate to my best friend and I. But it’s nonetheless a relationship, and the fact is other than family members there is no one I’ve known as long as I’ve known him.

Most things boil down to pride, especially with Trey and I, and I think we are both so aware that we constantly try to prove our value to the other. It’s not an effort or a chore. It’s just something we do.

I look up to Trey in a lot of ways, and not only because I’m 5’7″ and he’s over 6 feet tall. He makes me a better, smarter person. That is more important than my political outlook and all of my favorite sports teams combined. There just aren’t very many people throughout my life who have had the same impact.

Trey is still a kid. He still has a lot to learn. But just like the stock market, or betting on sports, I have always been playing the long game with him. For half my life I have bet on him to be a winner, mostly because there is no other reasonable outcome I could think of. He doesn’t read books. His math skills were never much to write home about. He didn’t go to college.

But that has no impact on my view that he is one of the smartest people I have ever known.

Trey is going to do big shit with his life, and I’m excited to play a part in seeing him get there. I am absolutely convinced that someday we are going to look back at our 20’s as a weird and confusing era in the grand scheme of life, but also that they were some of the most critical moments. The stage where we started to understand our place in the world, and using it as fuel to get us wherever it was we needed to go.