Choices, Chance or Luck?

I'm thinking of my youth tonight, a place I don't go to very much. It's kind of like a dark alley for me, with memories threatening to jump out from the shadows. I was writing something about the drug culture in my neighborhood where I grew up, and it made me think back.

I have two good friends from high school that I stay in touch with and am close to even today. But I'm thinking of the other one tonight, one I lost touch with many years ago.

We both grew up in the same neighborhood, with the same broken up, messed up crazy families. We both went to the same high school. She was a year older than me, a beautiful, spiritual and artistic girl. Her spirit was just so full of love.

She had to have a surgery that kept her out of school for a few months, and she fell behind with her coursework. There was a high school drop out guy who had some time on his hands who started to hang around. He didn't treat her like the piece of meat to be ridiculed and gossiped about later like the other guys she encountered did. No, instead he showed her a whole new way to make the pain go away.

Drugs.

I don't really know, I think she was grateful for the attention and bored, stuck at home with the hideous life I also had a few blocks away. Eventually, she became pregnant, and decided to drop out of school, too. Told me it wasn't so bad, she'd be a mom, they'd maybe get married. We started drifting out of each other's lives. Pretty soon, another baby was on the way, and she came by, asking for money to help. She looked haggard and sounded surly most times.

The last I heard of her, she was selling heroin out of a van on the streets, living in it.

I thought I saw her once. I was on my way to some fancy dinner party downtown, and we drove past someone that looked like her. "I wanted to scream and shout, stop the damned car!" and run over to her. Except the people I was with didn't know about me. All polished up and pretty, educated and shiny, hair coiffed and makeup on, they had no idea of where I came from, nor would they have understood it if I'd tried to explain. And what would I say to her?

I've tried to find her since, but she's nowhere to be found. We were very much the same, and came from the same environment, but we took very different paths.

I think I strive to avoid the dark alleys of my memories. Yet every time I've found someone who reminds me of her, I work that much harder. I don't want to see beautiful, spiritual, wonderful people having that kind of life. There are those who say, we're exactly where we're meant to be for a reason and that there are lessons we learn in life from our experience. We can't take those away from people,. Still, I'd have liked to have seen something better happen for her.

I'm not really sure why I didn't end up going down that path. Was it choice, chance, luck or some combination? I think the thing I had with me during those years was a desire to get out of the environment I was in, the neighborhood that I was in. I had a belief that there had to be something out there that was better than what I was living with. I'm not really certain what I based that on, since I hadn't experienced anything different at that time, except to say that I had an active imagination, or ability to speculate on the possibilities that something, maybe, could be different.

Maybe, on some implicit level, I realized that while I couldn't change my environment or the people in it, I had the power to create something new and different for myself.

And I still do.

Do you?