The first day of the rest of my life

I could start by telling you that in my new home there are thirty-one steps up to my converted attic room on the third floor where a single skylight frames direct sunlight for 15 minutes at 3pm, and where my bed with its white linens lies against the soft white walls on the dull wood-slated floor. Or how, in Belfast, the sky is a perpetual whirl of black and rain and gray and shocking blue and blinding sun. Or maybe I could tell you about the time that the terrorist group the UVF dressed in sharp red uniforms beating drums and blowing horns marched through our neighborhood while children walked alongside mimicking the loyalists' gun twirls with their toy flutes. But really maybe I should focus on the abundant garden in our backyard overgrown with heavy sunflowers and empty strawberry greens and prickly borage leaves where I found a dozen potatoes the size of my hand hiding just below the earth between leaves of spicy arugula. Or how on my birthday my flatmate Lauren and I sat down to watch a cooking show featuring her friend before she surprised me with a copy of his cookbook and a chocolate ginger cake featuring 10 eggs and a pound of butter. But if I start talking about Lauren and her stories of raising and butchering her own chickens and pigs or of collecting shellfish for a massive paella on the rocky coast of Donegal, then I'll never get to tell you about my very first class at Queen's University Belfast that threw me into a blur of philosophical debates over the evolutionary cause and nature of consciousness. And if I start off on a tangent about class and lectures and professors with British accents I'll inevitably skip over the part about our 3-month old black and white cat that incessantly drinks out of the glass on the table vasing the purple chive flowers. But I would hate to waste time on cats and risk losing the chance to tell you about my neighborhood in protestant east Belfast where the flags fly British and I have my choice between three butchers, three bakers, and three..vegetable makers. But focusing on my neighborhood would only lead me back up the thirty-one wooden stairs, back to my attic room with the slanted ceiling and the single skylight, back to that patch of 3 'o clock sun.