I'm going to be honest in a way that I’m not usually honest right now. I've slid into an entirely new form of trashiness, one that I am generally morally opposed to and one that I am always physically uncomfortable with. My friend Danny and I are smoking. So Trippe’s smoking and he has a friend that also smokes, big deal right? Anybody who's anybody that knows Trippe Davis knows that he smokes. Well, I'm not just smoking; I'm smoking inside and not just inside someone else’s house or at some bar but inside my own house, my own bar. I'm drinking a "Red Stripe" (Prominent Jamaican Lager, or beer) and Danny is having a little Rum & Coke. We're reading poetry and drinking alcohol and smoking, in my house. This may seem ridiculous but it is actually SO NECESSARY!
You may or may not know that I have a fiery passion for writing and an even hotter one for reading but I think that I secretly read in hopes of being a better writer. The last two months of my life I have written absolutely NOTHING worth reading and what’s worse, the months before that, the time that Laura and I were starting to spend a lot of time together and then when we first started dating I was writing the best shit I’d ever written, stuff that I thought I could improve a little bit and be able to make a living off of, now I can’t write the inside flap of some cheap Christian hard back novel. However, in desperation and with high hopes of writing something wonderful tonight I decided to try something new and smoke inside, surrounded by my favorite books, and my good friends, Danny, beer, & cigarettes, so far it’s working, not because I’ve written anything outside of this and not that this is wonderful but with it I am well pleased because to some extent I am writing like myself and something I’ve done has made me happy.
Life has been different lately. I went home for Christmas and it was good to be home but all being in South Carolina and Georgia really did for me this time was confirmed even more that this was my home, not absolutely but currently. It was a blessing to be home, my mother and I had one of the best conversations on Christmas Eve that I’ve ever had with her in the entirety of my twenty years. A damn raccoon attacked one of our cats and we found the wound around midnight on Christmas Eve. It was a very bad wound and later we found out it was abscessed. Anyway, as soon as we found the bloody gash in my cats back leg we made phone calls to veterinarians and gathered enough information to know that we had to take the cat to Gainesville, Georgia, which is about thirty minutes south of my hometown. On the way there my mother and I smoked together, something she doesn’t do very often, and we had the most honest, most healing, peaceful, gut-wrenching, tear invoking, conversation I’ve ever had with my mother. We talked about my dad for a long time and I began to better understand my struggles and my situation, as well as hers. We spoke of my childhood and growing up entirely under her reign. It was one of those things that happens to you when you’ve drifted away from who God is, not because you’re a young enough Christian to still be doubting Him but because you’re a calloused enough Christian to question his relevancy and sometimes even whether or not he’s actually in your life at all, kind of thing.
That night God reminded me who He is and why. He refreshed the promises he made me thousands of years ago and held me so much closer than I can recall him holding me in so long. I talked to my girlfriend that night too, and with a sense of hope that overcame anything I’ve ever felt that involved me and another girl. I felt like almost everything that could ruin us would surely be defeated if for no other reason that the fact that I now knew what those things were and realized I already knew how to defeat them. I realized why I am how I am and why I struggle in the ways that I do when I’m in a relationship. I also realized all the more why she’s my girlfriend and why this may work, how well she knows me and how much more she wants to know me. Rarely in my life have I been liked for who I am that very moment, at my darkest, most despairing moment. I have been loved by everyone who has laid eyes on me at some point (pretty much, lol), maybe just for my hair, my height, my sense of humor, unfortunately, usually because of who “I’m going to be one day” or how wonderful of a “pastor and/or husband” I’ll be. Those things put more pressure on a man than a man can handle. The assumptions of who you will be, the love that you feel is so conditional once you realize that you are not yet that person that they claim to love once you become that glorious being. Laura is different. Laura is in disbelief that I’m not happy with who I am sometimes because she likes who I am right now so damn much, it’s hard for me to receive that sometimes to be honest. I’m not half as bad at loving as I am at being loved, though if I were to be honest, there’s nothing I want more. God has blessed me far beyond my capacity to understand or comprehend the blessings but I am learning what it means to be grateful.
I am a fouled and flawed human in the hands of an infallible God. I know that now more than I ever have before. I am also more thankful of that now than I have ever been before.
Grace & Peace,
Trippe Davis
