Matt Wilson

The first real friend I ever made. I was in third grade just starting in a new school after moving in the summer. He was a taller kid and we joked around and had fun in class and got into trouble, it helped that we rode the same school bus. On the weekend we would go on day hikes all over. We lived out of town and so there was a lot of open space that we wanted to see. One place in particular was a lake that was about five miles away from his house and I can't count how many times we went out planning on reaching that lake and every time we would stop at the half way point which was a twenty foot waterfall. Then one day his dad was told they had to move to an even smaller town in Wyoming (he was a preacher for the Nazarene Church). By this time we were in the seventh grade, and very close friends. The news crushed me and so he moved and over the next few years we wrote each other sparingly and even visited one summer. but by the time I was in high school we had lost contact, then right before I left for a two year journey he stopped by my house out of the blue and we decided to make one last attempt to reach the lake, this time we did and if on a screenplay we reached it during sunset. We sat and talked and caught up on our lives, our paths were not the same and yet our friendship was still there. I haven't seen or heard from him since. He joined the air force and so I don't even know if he's alive or not but at the heart of it we're still best friends.