Very soon now, I’ll be leaving this place. In less then three months my time at Legacy will be done, and it will be time for me to move on. Where to, I’m not sure yet, at the moment I have a number of options. I could move to New York City and attend a very expensive liberal arts college in the upper-east side of Manhattan. I could go to Louisiana and attend a university that has already generously given me a scholarship and an out-of-state tuition waver. Or I could spend a year at the University of Texas at Arlington living with two of my best friends before transferring to Austin in my sophomore year of college.

All three of these options sound pretty cool, all things considered. But where to go? What road do I take? Each one would take me somewhere very different from the others; one will lead me to one of the busiest and coolest cities on the planet, but will cost my parents a huge chunk of change. And I’ll be farther away from home than I’ve ever been. The other road will lead to a place nearby and close to those I’ve grown accustomed to seeing, but will it satisfy my hunger for adventure and departure? The third road will take me to a university that’s offering me thousands of dollars to study inside its walls. Can I in my right mind pass that up?

  I’ve given each of these options a lot of thought. And the more I think about it, the more these three roads seem to be more similar than it originally seemed. For one thing, as my dad as been saying for some time now, college is college. In this dark economic age, I should thank God college is even an option. But to go a bit deeper, the reason all three of these roads may ultimately lead to similar destinations is because in all three of them, I will still be me. 

 There’s this mindset that college is a chance to hit the restart button on life; a chance to become someone different from who you were in high school. And I’d like to believe that, but I can’t. Six months from now I will still be Nick Jimenez, whether I’m in New York, Louisiana or Texas. I will have the same insecurities and neurosis that I have now and I will have the same gifts and skills I possess here at Legacy. So ultimately the choice of what road to take becomes irrelevant, because in all of them I remain the same. I don’t know what life has in store for me. I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years or what I’ll believe in; who or what I’ll be in love with. To quote Fitzgerald, “I know myself, and that is all.”