captured thought: living worldwide

I have known since I left New Jersey and had seen RENT, which inexplicably brought out a previously unexpressed adoration of New York City in me, that I want to move to said city for college. I want to be there my entire life, honestly, until I find myself being forced to move my new family to Washington D.C. to help govern the country. I've found that New York is the perfect place to grow for me: I can be a hired artist, as I have wanted to be since as far back as I can remember. I can act, as there is Broadway and numerous film acting agencies there. I can be with the people with whom I identify with the most and have a burning desire to return to (your stereotypical Italians who have huge family dinners every Sunday, with the angry grandmother holding a wooden spoon who is feeding 10 but cooks for 25) and also all the other cultures that make up that beautiful city (which I call beautiful even in the sight of rats and cockroaches that crawl through one's walls) that I have been deprived of since moving to the Chicagoland area.
I have no doubt that this is where I want to be, and that my future lies there and I certainly pray that I am not deprived of my city for too long. Even though I love it more than any other place that I have yet been to or studied in this world, I realized today that there are parts of myself that are attached elsewhere, whether I'd like to admit it or not. I was talking to my mom about my future, and about life during and after college, and the immense amount of things I want to do in life and the little time I have to do them, and I started thinking globally.
It was likely because we were speaking in French. But there is a possibility for me to study worldwide in a Francophone region, and not only would I love to study or live there, but almost ANYWHERE in western Europe. My mother said, out of all European places she'd been to, I'd like Rome the most. I personally don't know why, being that I am in love with Ireland, Belgium, France, and Canada (of which my mother is a Quebecoise citizen). There's mythology and art and history in all of them that calls back to the older parts in me, calling me to the woods, out of the city, and to be in touch with total immersion in foreign (yet familiar) bliss. Maybe it is why I can do foreign accents so well: I'm supposed to. Maybe I'm meant to adapt and travel Europe and be a world citizen, a citizen of the arts, of love, and not the boundaries of a country. If we are meant to be something, perhaps that is what I am meant to be. I have always felt a desire to do good for others, and this has even caused me to desire joining the Peace Corps, or some peaceful organization, and traveling to Sudan, proving that I wish to even put my own body in harm's way as long as I feel I am of good worth.
A part of me hates this about myself, that I would give away this desire to go to New York, because people have always told me all the things I should be worried about and have tried to, for a still misunderstood reason, dissuade me from living there as fats as possible. I still want to do that. If nothing else, New York is where I'd start: it has all I want, even a forest among skyscrapers. But I know that that is not where I'll easily stay. A part of me, a very big, ancient-rooted part of me wants me to go where I have never set foot before, yet know and love so well with my heart and imagination. A part of me wants me to find a romantic French woman just as much as a sassy New Yorker woman, and wants me to travel the world just as much as it wants me to stay in the city for the rest of my life. These parts of my spirit are tearing at me from both sides, yet one part, only now coming into its muscled adolescence, has an entire continent on its side, much more than the part that holds a city on its back. I believe, in the end, both sides may get their wish--I hope this is the case.
Because above all, I know that wherever I go, I should not remain here. I know that my future, who I am going to be, has not even begun to flower, and so much is out there for me to discover- and it's all spread out across the world, waiting patiently for me to step on its welcoming terre.