How I would love to go back to some of those secret and marvelous places when I was a young girl and visit with her once again. I'd like to tell her what I've learned and what I've done and seen and experienced, and let her decide for herself what she wanted to do with her life.

She's somewhere still, deep inside, hiding, or cast aside as if she were longer wanted or needed......something she was used to, something she had experienced more than once in her life.

Listening to the latest tunes on the radio and dreaming of finding that special man who she would marry and have children with and be happy. Wishing for that special place where she would feel loved and secure and cherished. Wondering if she would ever find it.

Then along came a man and in her haste to find that special man and have that happy life, she mistakenly thought she had found her wish come true and without a pause she jumped into a marriage, a marriage she would long regret for years to come.

But what did she know of marriage, love, life or living? She had barely had the chance to find out who she was before she turned her life over to another. No one ever told her that doing so would be the biggest mistake of her life. No one ever told her that life could be something she planned and directed for herself. No one ever told her about choices and that she had choices to make.

Somehow she managed to grow up not knowing things that were necessary for making good and solid decisions and now she wondered how that could have been. Could it have been her own ignorance and inherent lethearagy that made her this way or was something left out of her upbringing that made her that way.

Was there nothing of a rebel or questioner in this girl? Was she such a sheep and a follower that she never even thought to questions these things in her life? Had her natural rebelliousness been squelched at an early age and she never was able to recover it ever again?

What was it? What happened to her? How did she come to find herself in a situation where she could never open her mouth and express her own needs and feelings and anger? How did it happen? She would like to know. It wouldn't make much of a difference in her how her life turned out, but to be able to know how it happened would give her some comfort. She would like to know if it had been her fault entirely or not.

She honestly didn't know what she was getting herself into. She believed in the happily ever after or wanted to so much that she discounted all that she saw before her and couldn't bring herself to admit that happiness wasn't to be found anywhere that she went.

That girl lives in me somewhere and sometimes she comes out and then she feels the sadness of her life, the life she had hoped for never came to be. She likes to remind me that this is what happens when I go about without looking at the world realistically and with rose colored glasses.

This girl didn't deserve what came to her. She never had the need or urge to hurt another person and she felt a very strong respect and honor towards other people and treated others in this way. What she didn't know or expect that there were other people who didn't see the world the same way she did, who didn't care about others feelings or how their actions could affect the people in their lives.

As the years went by and one by one her dreams and hopes were smothered or exposed as just so much romantic fluff, she began to lose some of herself, inch by inch, until she had learned to build this shell about herself that she would never let anyone in to get to close to her again. All of the dreams, hopes, and imaginings she had ever had were killed one by one. Each and every time she would push the young self away and cover her with layer after layer of bitter life experiences until even she forgot about her young self and became so lost to herselft she no longer knew who she had been, what her hopes had been, her thoughts, her dreams, her wants or needs were gone too.

There were times when she would sit and try to remember who she had once been, hoping that at least there really had been a real self at one time in her life. It was too scarey to think she had never had any substance and had never been a real person at all. If she hadn't been a real person when she was young all those years ago what made her think she could become the real person she was meant to be now?

Maybe she would never find that young self again, never become the person she had been meant to be. Surely there was something more to herself than what she was now. What she was now was someone who seemingly had no backbone for the whole of her life, whom people had used and walked over and had felt contempt for her since she was so easy to manipulate. How pathetic she is to this person she is now. How desperately she is needing to find a strong and fine self buried somewhere deep inside herself.

Had her entire life been one big joke? Was this all there was to be of her? This was it? It couldn't be that simple could it, that she would never be more than she was right now and never did have a chance of being something better and bigger than she was?

One thing she discovered as she wrote about this person who was herself, but who she spoke of as if someone else, a stranger perhaps, how much easier it was to write about her if she thought of her as someone else and not of herself. What exactly does that mean or say about her? Perhaps she thinks too much about that kind of thing and it may not be of help to her anyway.

How easy it is to waste time thinking about things that nothing can be done about instead of actually doing something real that could make a difference in her life. Contemplation is a barrier to do anything constructive. How convienent for her to be this way. Why, she is beginning to find out that she has been fooling herself for all of these many years. This is frightening to her. It is not what she expected to find at all.

She has hidden her real self for so many years that she is now all but lost to herself and not having a clue as to where to start to get herself back or if she even can get herself back. This is disturbing to herself and she doesn't know if she wants to continue to think about this. What if she finds out things she doesn't really want to know about herself? What is she to do with that?