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At the beginning of the summer, I found out my friend's parents were sending her to Canada for summer camp. She was a problem to them in the past, she would do thing like overdose on Tylenol to get high. But, she always opened up to me. From the things she told me, it seemed like her family caused her a lot of stress, and she acted out because she couldn't stand their confinement.

She expressed to me that she was trying not to do things that were only destructive to her, and tried to stop doing things that made her family look down on her. She was trying to become a better person for their sake.

She told me she had some kind of mental disorder, but it seemed as though she was always just put under stress.

The end of summer came, and I never heard anything from her. I called her, but her phone was still on a hold. I saw someone that looked a lot like her at the mall the other day. She was only a few feet away from me, I don't know why I couldn't bring myself to say anything to her.

Because I saw this person, it made me wonder if a mutual friend of ours had seen or heard anything from her. He told me that last thing he heard was that she was institutionalized.

Two years ago, I had a friend of mine die. It was probably the worst thing I had felt up to then. The idea that I would never get to speak to this person again, someone I had planned to visit the next time I go back home, the idea that I never had a chance to say goodbye, it tore me apart.

But now, I'm in a situation where someone is telling me I can't see someone, that if I never see them again it's because they said, it's so much worse. But the worst blow is that even if she can have visitors or get mail, I still can't contact her because I don't know where she is. At least with a friend that's dead I can send his dad flowers and say "These are for Corey, would you mind putting them by the urn?"

With Brittany, I can't send her a birthday card and let her know that I care, I can't let her know that I'm thinking of her, all because her parents don't want to deal with raising a child, and don't want to kick out her alcoholic abusive brother.