A life made of scars.

(Mom, if you're reading this, don't freak out. I'm still safe. I swear).

Edit: This is not to say that a person shouldn't be safe. Being dumb is one thing, letting life happen to you instead of being scared of it is the whole point. One should live dangerously, but safely so. Confusing? Oh yeah it is.

Met some new friends here at the Prison Hostel and we all decided to go to the club (well, let's be honest, multiple clubs [edit: a few days later we all went to a silent club! You get headphones and choose the channels to dance to! Crazy]). There's about six of us (from around the world) and I jump on the back of a motorbike with a super, chill guy named JC (from Chicago). It's his first time driving the bike, so he doesn't know where the horn and lights are. But he's driving safe, alright? (JC, it was worth it, except the pain that is. That sucked).

Fast forward later in the night and we're going to the next party. It's JC, myself, and a cool girl named Tove (from Europe). We follow our group but get completely lost in the jungle of small, maze-like streets.

So picture this. We're lost, cruising down the most insane streets and we can't figure out how to turn on the headlights and turn off the blinkers (we drive in style and flair here in India). We turn down a "road" that looks pretty legit. But WHAM! SNAP! CRACK! Massive brick piles in the way.

Pile of bricks. Many piles of bricks.

We go down.

And, a little hard to imagine, I know, but we are all laughing like absolutely insane people.

I land on the exhaust and get a pretty nasty burn [edit: after a hospital visit a week later, it was most certainly a third degree burn. Ouch]. But I'm still cackling (more on why later in the blog). Sidenote: Tove also has a pretty decent burn from an earlier, different accident (it may or may not happen a lot here). We get back up, dust of those boots, and Little Engine that Could it again. We get even more lost in a side-street that looks like were entering Narnia or Oz. We find our way back and we're cool.


Next night, JC crashes again, twice. The first was good (it was only a ditch), but the 2nd time we almost fly into in a lake/river but spun out right before the water. We're pros at crashing by now and we basically stand up as the bike gets taken away from us.

Like bosses.

But, yeah, again my leg hits the exhaust (thanks missing guard) and I have another good sized burn underneath my knee.

We all were laughing again (mostly because we survived the crash again, and we feel like, legit, right. Maria is laughing [well, giggling, from her view on another bike]).

So, why laugh?
Crashing is not funny and neither are burns or worse.

And it could have been oh, so much worse.

JC keeps remarking how amazing I was taking in the crashes and burns.

And that's the thing. Why freak out? Why get mad? Yes, they're scars, and yes, they hurt, and yes they suck.

But it comes to this: scars can also prove a life lived. It proved you were in the here and now and have one amazing story to tell those grand kids one day.

You can point to it, your life, and say, "I was there. I lived it. I existed and I truly LIVED!" (this is half of a bad paraphrase from the quite excellent One Hour Photo)

No matter what you believe in (or don't believe in), you're body is going to be gone one day.

One day, you're body will be decomposing in the earth. Gross, I know. Whatever tattoos you had, whatever scar, whatever anything you had will be food for the worms.

The point is: it's just a body. It really is. And scars prove that you lived a life. It reminds me of that quote "I don't want to tiptoe my life just to arrive safely at death."

So, yes, I was laughing. So was JC. So was Tove.

Because I'm in India, on a sketchy motorbike, with a new driver in the craziest backwards streets living a life many only get to dream about. What a fucking amazing scar.

These scars will prove I lived. Sometimes unsafely and sometimes with too much safety.

I wouldn't take any of these scars back.

Never, ever.

For a million years.