There's something about the end of the year, a nearly tangible essence that filters through the halls lined with just emptied-lockers, seeping into sticky rooms, reassuring anxious test-takers that the promise of summer will soon be fulfilled. A luscious melange of anticipation, regalement, and quiescence, I revel in this blissfull denoument as I have for the past ten years, knowing I will soon be free from the constraints and pressures of public high school. This time around, the feeling is different, heightened, more acute. This year I'm drawn to more than lazy days of endless TV and time at the pool. The sense that I'm about to embark on a unique journey, across oceans to a place I've never been before, a place that I know little about is both frightening and attractive in such a tantalizingly close way that I can't help but count the days till my departure.
My home in Connecticut is a bubble. When I was eleven I ventured out of its protective walls when I moved with my family to Tokyo, only to find myself in another bubble of the expatriot lifestyle and American International Schools. In Cadiz, I'll live with a family who doesn't speak my language, a daunting but enthralling experience. I look forward to this challenge of communication and adaptation and view it as my first steps down the path to becoming a truly global citizen, not just someone who reads and studies and sees other cultures on TV, but envelopes themselves in it in order to fully understand. Speaking the language, enjoying the food, participating in the customs, is the only way to do more than soley observe a place but go as far as to be a part of it. I feel like I'm on the cusp of a life-changing, eye-opening, (yes, cliche-filled) experience, and I can't wait to meet my homestay family, the staff, and the other students and begin my journey.
As I wade through the waters of the final days of my sophomore year, I feel the promise of Cadiz and the unknown treasures it holds all around me. I submit my summer, a misshapen lump of clay, to the spirit of Cadiz, and allow it to mold it into something that I know will leave an indelible mark on the impressionable clay that is me, I just don't yet know what shape this imprint will become.
