It is my first post of 2017! Hello, new year! Hello, resolutions that will likely peter out by February! Please, stay awhile! (Especially you flaky resolutions. I see you loitering by the door).

This year is different in that I, like I’m sure many people have, grown up a great deal. I am not setting the kind of goals that will make me laugh in a month, and I am no longer looking at the future as if it were on the other side of a starry-eyed river, hidden behind quixotic palm trees swaying in a flawless, “I’ll-be-happy-when-I’m-older” breeze.

I’ve grown up.

This is the year I will start what I’ve been calling “real life,” but is more commonly referred to as college. I’ll finally test out these wings I’ve been aching to spread for so many years.

And trust me, I’m planning on going places with ’em.

If all goes according to my wildest dreams that are fast approaching reality, I will be doing some major traveling in 2017. I no longer have to regard an international adventure as something impossible and blurry on the horizon; I’m nearly there already.

A few of the places I hope to see/am planning on seeing in the new year are as follows:

• Florence, Italy
• More of the west coast/countryside of Ireland
• Dublin, Ireland (naturally)
• Lucerne, Switzerland
• Cambridge and London, England

As of right now, this is a fairly rough plan, but as things become more stable in the months to come, I’m hoping to solidify some of these incoming adventures.

It’s just wild to think how rapidly life is changing, how quickly such daunting choices are upon my closest friends, my contemporaries, and me. To imagine my life in a year from now, at the birth of 2018… I don’t know who I will be having late night conversations with;  who I’ll go to for consolation; who I’ll be trusting deeply; who I’ll be laughing with about stupid, un-funny nonsense; let alone what country I’ll be in. That ambiguity is frightening.

But, by the same token, it is exhilarating.

For anyone who has found high school to be monotonous in innumerable ways, an unpredictable future is the light at the end of the tunnel. The prospect of unfamiliar faces, people I’ve yet to befriend, books I’ve yet to read, buildings I’ve yet to wander through, streets I’ve yet to explore…. I don’t know, maybe it is the travel bug rooted somewhere irretrievable within me, but that shit sounds like heaven.

I am certain that 2017 has started off quite differently from how it will likely end. I cannot say exactly what lies ahead of us in the coming year, but, my friends, I have a feeling it will be revolutionary in the best of ways.