Birthday Blues

Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. Here are some words I wrote in my notebook:

"It's the next 23 years of my life that will define my work, they will perhaps be the 23 most vibrant, engaged years of my life. How many 23-year cycles am I entitled to? Oh, near-quarter-life-crisis, I feel your hand's grip on my coronary artery, sucking the air from my lungs, forcing me to confront mortality's moonlike presence. 46 + 23 = 69 - maybe I'll make it. 23 after that? 92...umm...I don't know to even imagine that. When I consider my journey over the past year, the prospect of a new year enlivens me, 365 more days to step into a building whose general contour mark the only apparent quality. The insides of that building - the people, the rooms, the aches and joys, the love and hate, its essence, its innards - will be revealed as each second in the new year elapses. Last year this time I was in Milan, Italy. My sister had just married, I was with my parents and grandmother and mokour Karine and digin Janet. There was a job offer - to move to Armenia and overtake directing the Janapar Trail in the Nagorno Karabagh Republic (http://www.janapar.org/wiki/Main_Page), but ultimately that fell through because job funding was lost. On October 10, 2008, the last place I expected to end up was in San Francisco with a different, equally special Karin, and I truly wonder where I will be October 10, 2010. That would be 10/10/2010; the alignment of numbers terrifies me. There's a numerical significance to it that I can't yet wrap my mind around. Dread morphs into excitement when I zoom in to focus on one year increments, morphed back into dread when I zoom out to analyze greater structures of chronology, narrative, life. Some live in the past, some in the present, some in the future. I strive for balance, aware that there are people in my life who cause me to analyze one aspect more than the other, further aware that a special few help me find that balance. I have many goals before reaching 24 - they involve a book I hand wrote in Lebanon that I'm still typing up, a huge pile of poetry I'm still editing, a new screenplay, musical dreams - there is a key to this, a realization Karin made that is alarmingly true. Later is now. No more saying "I'll do it later." This implies a promised future. If there's something I feel I need to do, I do it now. Later is now. If I had to guess where I'll be next year, it's either San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. I have some notions of circumstance, but dare not speak them. Not yet.