One more day.

   Long story short, at midnight tonight, I turn older than I ever expected to live. I remember the first time I was given a life expectancy. It was at a place called 'Project Off-Streets', with my 'worker' who I would see once, who looked at me a wet behind the ears, pretty much full on suburban kid who thought he was a lot tougher than he was, and said, 'Get tough or die kid, these streets are gonna eat you alive.' I had moved into the shelter they had put me in shortly after. I walked through the secure doors, and into the place that I would call home. I had just put my back pack into my room, and was on my way down in the elevator, I was wearing a red sweatshirt, that kept me warm, as the elevator stopped, I don't remember what floor, another kid got into the elevator. He eyed me up and down, he was dressed in blue from head to toe, before I knew what was happening, he pulled a gun from his waistband, stuck it in my eye, and said, 'you new? just so you know, red don't fly 'round here, got it?' He put the gun back in his waistband like it was just another day at the office, and stepped from the elevator.
    As I stepped from the elevator, I heard a scuffle to my right, the 410 was a shelter for women and children, and I was about to find out why there were two sets of locking doors on the way in. A large man was shoving his way through the door as a woman frantically was telling the front desk to call 911, as the man made his way through the door, I saw something in his hand, as I was trying to figure out what it was, his arm flashed forward. I quickly figured out what it was, as the glass exploded on the side of the woman's face, he had hit her with a glass bottle. I watched in stunned silence as the man proceeded to run out the door, and the people at the desk huddled around the woman, not only attempting to stop the bleeding in the gaping wound that ran from her ear to her shoulder blade, but to secure the front doors so the attacker could not return.
    As we stood there, my soon to be best friend, Josh, looked at me and said, 'welcome to the 410, if any of us make it out alive, we should consider ourselves lucky.' Josh quickly became my best friend, we spent pretty much all of our time together. He used to always say, 'we'll be lucky if we make it to 16.' He didn't, I did.
   Throughout much of the rest of my life so far, I lived fast, much of it was either feast or famine, life or death, and time and time again, I would hear, 'You won't make it past 16, 18, 19, 20, and so on and so forth. I didn't care. I figured, Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse. That was the credo that me and most of the people I ran with adopted. Time and time again, many of them lived and died by that.
   Now here it is, my life has changed in many ways, and in that, I still had it in the back of my head, death is chasing me, it chases all of us. Yet, I had one last prediction for me, 38, and in that, I kept on seeing 38's everywhere.
   My beliefs are still what my beliefs are, and yet, I still do have some quandaries, or superstitions per say. So, I guess, yeah, few more hours, and I will pass that point... so, here's to a few more hours. :)