There had been dreams, once. Once those dreams had filled the long hours after school and before bedtime with hope. The work that had to be done had been easy to complete when there was some future to look forward to. The future had looked so appealing. It was almost as if she could get to that place she wanted with no effort, as if by floating day after day through life she would wake up suddenly from a trance and be there, living a life full of friends and activities and romance and pleasure.

The future had arrived now. The years had flown by, indeed, but they had flown and faded and left her nothing. She had no dreams now, and nothing to hold on to when the solitude was most depressing. While her childhood friends were expanding their world, meeting new people and attending school and developing likes and dislikes and preferences and having boyfriends and girlfriends and relationships, speaking and being spoken to, she was left frozen in time. She was left exactly where she had been all those years, a taller, fuller girl standing in the place of the child. She was growing, but she was still there, and there was no way out of it.

There had once been dreams, but now there was only cold reality, and thought, and facts. She read books because in books no one was frozen in time unless they were written to be. They were characters in stories and they could do anything if only the plot carried them to do so. If they had to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to study for tests or eagerly absorb the knowledge that they craved, they could do so. She had no passion. She was not a character in a book. She was her living her solitary life, trapped in a world where the price of putting gas in her car outweighed the price of withering away in a friendless room.

It made her sick because there was nobody who really understood her. She had been taken to see a psychiatrist. The counselor liked her and tried to understand, but she was confused. Who lived a life like this girl lived? Who had such limited social activity at this age? Seventeen was no age to be spending all your time alone.

Barred from attending a normal high school by the beliefs of her parents. Separated from her only remaining childhood friend by nearly a hundred miles. Suffering from depression, daily lingering on the edge of despair, hopelessly plodding through schoolwork that had been left untouched for too long, and searching for a way out.

Story of my life.