My Friend Who Loves Shakira

One drive across Colombia, one song on repeat.

It was August 20th, 2017, and I couldn’t help but notice that he looked exactly like me. In his navy-blue sweater flecked with highlighter yellow and orange. I was wearing something similar. What a sweet-looking guy, I thought to myself as I took a seat three chairs down from him. Even his glasses resembled mine—round frames, tortoise-shell pattern. Were they also Warby Parker’s Gregory Peck model?

I met my dear friend Christopher Tibble, or Tibby as I call him, on the first day of class at Columbia Journalism School. We became fast friends after discovering we had similar taste in fashion. Day after day, he’d scurry into our seminars dressed in the exact same outfit as me. Blue and white Oxford button downs. Brown leather chelsea boots. Olive green field jackets, paired with a rumpled white t-shirt.

Me and my fashion twin, my best friend, Tibby.

I liked Tibby immediately because where I was loud and brash, he was quiet and clever. He rarely spoke in class and always did the readings. I never did the readings and spoke through most of class. We grew incredibly close over one year in New York, and I never got over how wonderful and strange it was to have a new best friend at the age of 31. Especially a friend like Tibby. That he even existed was so surprising to me.

I guess I figured that if I ever found a boy who loved talking about history, and literature, and his mom as much as I did, it would be in the basement of a frat house and he’d be telling me he was bisexual right as I attempted to French kiss him. I was from Charlotte, North Carolina after all. When Tibby told me he was from Colombia, I just assumed he meant the hell hole capital of South Carolina. Not the country in South America. But this blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy was from Bogotá. He just happened to see life through the same eyes as me. I hate to quote the film Carol when referring to anything other than a forbidden lesbian romance, but to me, my new best friend from Bogotá truly felt “flung out of space.”

Sometime during the year after graduate school, Tibby decided to move back to Colombia. He could’ve made it in New York media, but his home was Bogotá, and he wanted to go home. I missed him desperately once he was gone, so in 2019 I decided to pay him a visit. We spent two weeks road tripping around his home country, bouncing between Bogotá , Cali, and his family’s ranch in the northeastern corner of Colombia.

We drove through dense rainforest, and climbed up steep mountains while talking for hours about all of our favorite topics: history, literature,

our moms. Tibby taught me about the Colombian Civil War and the 2016 peace deal. He explained the FARC to me. He introduced me to great artists like Doris Salcedo. He tried to get me to read important Colombian authors like Gabriel García Márquez, too, but gave up after I told him I couldn’t get through the first chapter of 100 Years of Solitude because the lead character was too obsessed with his penis. (I stand by this opinion!)