I have always felt like high school is just the foundation for my life, not my life itself. High school is the place where the scope of my options is decided. Like: will I get into a good college? What will I study (I'm pretty much decided on international relations, double majoring in a specific cultural study, either latin american or middle eastern)? Where will I live? Etcetera. But my real life? That starts later. It starts in roughly a year and three months, actually. When I graduate high school.
I'm not saying college is where my life starts, because I don't know if that'll be much realer than high school. It kind of depends on where I go. If I go to UNC (kind of a nightmare, but it is less expensive than my top choices, by far), it will not be real life because at least half of at least the top ten percent of my high school class will go there and I will know people and I will still be in small-ish-town-North-Carolina (albeit a different town). If I go to NYU, then that could be my real life, depending on what I do with the opportunity and experience.
But I'm not talking about college. I'm talking about my gap year. Yay gap year! Hopefully, assuming all of my plans fall into place. Plans are that my friend C and I will buy the cheapest plane tickets to Europe we can find by September 2009, and go! We are saving our money, we are doing research (well, I am doing more research and he is saving more money, but whatever), we are making packing lists and lists of places to look for accomodations and lists of places we want to see and lists of websites to look for cheap tickets. Lists galore! We are hoping that the exchange rate gets better. We are hoping that we travel well together as the only travelling we have done together that is further than the next town over has been on school trips which don't really count. We are planning to see the world, but not just to see it: to hear it, smell it, feel it, taste it, experience it.
And that, that is where my life begins. My life begins in an airport, no more than eighteen months from now. The countdown began about a year ago when the first vague whisperings of this idea began to call to me, and it's just getting closer and closer. Yet still, it is so very unreal and far away.