Half-way through my 16th consecutive year of school, you could say I’ve been busy dying for most of my life. My years aren’t organized in seasons or months or lunar cycles, but in quarters and semesters and oddly placed breaks. My days have been fractioned into meaningless blocks of imaginary time like “recess” and “B-lunch” and “community time.” That’s why I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to get on a plane and fly away to London where I will begin my travels (and studies) across Central and Western Europe and, eventually, in China. It’s alright, Ma, I can make it.

The anticipation of travel, I’m told, is an essential element of the every journey. It is the mind’s preparation on the eve of chaos, an immersion in the unfamiliar that is travel. For three months I’ve been consumed by unstable anticipation, like a kid before Christmas, irresistibly excited to uncover the treasures that had so taunted me from behind their kitschy wrapping paper masks, yet worried, what if Santa didn’t get my list or confused my years-worth of good behavior with some other punk, placing me on the naughty list instead? Now it’s seemingly more rational; there’s the obvious excitement for my intended plans – more than a dozen countries in four months – and the apprehension of the unknown and the uncontrollable.

But the anticipation is unglamorous – and writing about it?! I hear there is a level of hell reserved for fools like me. It’s the writing about travel after the fact – posthumously, you might say – that has captured the attention of famous writers and popular audiences, historically. And for good reason. As Alain de Botton discusses in The Art of Travel, memory is selective and fragmented and, like a master painter, a good travel writer employs the inevitable process of selection in their retellings. Yet here I am, attempting to write about what hasn’t yet occurred – and write sensibly at that. This, I suppose, is an act of pre-telling. Stay with me, there’s a point coming somewhere here.

While abroad this semester I will be enrolled as a “half-time student” at Guilford taking eight-credits-worth of independent studies with some of my favorite professors – technically I am registered as, get this, a student living off campus. The central focus of my studies will be experiential travel writing and pilgrimage sites fieldwork, the former involving reading and writing about the places I visit and my experiences, the latter involving a makeshift tour of various pilgrimage destinations – Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, for example – and other hallowed locales – The Louvre in Paris or St. James’s Gate in Dublin. Although the details of my studies are not of particular interest to you and may never find their way into this column in the coming weeks, I must take a brief aside here to applaud this institution which has enabled me to, essentially, invent my own study abroad program, proving yet again that here at Guilford if you can dream it, there are many people around that will eagerly help you do it.

In my preparation for these studies I came to realize that my impending trip will be, in so many ways, my own pilgrimage, primarily in the sense that I am seeking personal spiritual knowledge. Exploring this thought further in the smaller hours of a warm winter night in Charlotte, my home away from Guilford, I now see this journey as a series of small pilgrimages. Here in the states it really is easy to see without looking too far, that not much is really sacred. But maybe once I leave, if I may wax poetic for a moment, I will realize the spiritual in someone else’s mundane. Perhaps I will find a long lost piece of my soul in Mona Lisa’s smile or taste the essence of my own existence in a fresh Guinness at its original Dublin brewery – I promise less metaphor and more drunken description when the time comes.

It hasn’t been easy to say goodbye and I’m not really sure if there’s a good way to leave best friends behind. So, I say “I’ll see you soon.” And I mean it. I need this break. For the first time in a long time, I’ll be busy being born.

If you’re reading this, I’m missing you.