Happy fucking birthday.

Well, I'm officially 21. My year definitely got off to a bang.

That's right, I made a joke about it. That's because I can laugh about it now, and I'm still not fucked up by thinking about the fact that I watched a man get shot to death about 20 feet from me while I was standing on the street after my birthday party and saw my friend lying on the street with people holding her side to hold the bleeding. Because she had been fucking shot.

Most of the time, I've been fine. In a way, the more I talk about it, the more unreal it becomes and the more it becomes just another story I can tell people. I don't want to dwell on it too much--as a friend said to me, it's easy to use this kind of thing as an excuse to sink into dark places. I certainly don't want to do that, but pretending everything's all sunshine and rainbows isn't the best idea either. I need to feel something--it's just hard to know what.

I was saying to some friends that maybe this is a karmic thing. Maybe the universe decided to get all the shitty-ness that will happen to me in the 21st year of my life out of the way three and a half hours into it. Lets hope. I'm just glad my friend is all right.