I’ve lived a year past my own personal life expectancy. April 17, 2009.
I should have died. A cliff. In India. No shoes. Jiten.
A time of my life when I expected to die and I’m here a year later. I’m not expecting death anytime soon anymore, but the first year of my real life was the most significant and eventful than any previous. Six jobs in a year, if you count being a merch girl and pro-bono lawyer as jobs. Life philosphy more fully understood through the understanding of thought unhindered by conditioning or past thoughts. Facial hair more fully developed.

I’ve learned to ‘live at home’, and what the phrase ‘live at home’ means. I’ve found home on floors of different houses, on beds of different friend’s, on trains of different countries. Last night home was the field of some redneck man in Kentucky that he called the ‘bottom’. Tonight in a basement in Delaware, the hardcore hotel, with six bunkbeds for ten traveling souls. Next month I will find a home in a new apartment and with new roommates in a new part of a new-ish city. I will always live at home, because home is where I am living. Living at home until I die.

Earlier in the day, Tom the GPS took us to Easy Street, a long, narrow, winding, gravel road up a mountain to try and get to a phantom venue. Flashes of India blasted into the foreground of my mind, cliff hanging and dodging buses of oncoming commuters. Cliff hanging, a year ago, Jiten, ripped toes, sharp rocks. He said it was easy. Easy Street is a real bitch and will always be that way.

I planned to celebrate this day as my new birthday. Six months and seven days after my original birth I have a new day of birth that signifies something better, something newer, something less covered in uterus goo and cheek pinching. And to celebrate the hope is to start off my second year of real life by going to Game Two in Washington. Because Year Two of Life Two means Game Two. Because Life Two is based on the faith that there is No Problem.  That is what Life Two is rooted in.

Here is to the beginning of Year Two of my life that might actually matter. My life of actual discovery and examination. My new real life.