Throughout my life, I have seen many of my friends fall by the wayside. They have struggled, stumbled, and fallen all too comfortably into the stride of mediocrity despite what they were capable of. One person in particular breaks my heart each time I see her.

Renee and I were best friends for the bulk of my childhood. From elementary school to high school we were one another’s support through life. We grew up together through those awkward phases and those strange years of confusion. Renee was my diary and my security blanket through a lot of my struggles.

During our sophomore year, everything came to a grinding, shattering halt. Renee made the foreboding decision to give her virginity to the boy that she’d been dating, on and off, for a year. In addition to this mishap, she’d also thrown her other morals to the wind, falling into the abyss of marijuana. Although she swore that she wasn’t addicted, she constantly denied my challenges of abstaining. Her decisions created first a crack, then a chasm in out friendship. I felt her slip from me and the lives that we used to lead. Eventually, I stopped reaching for her, ceased to offer my aid.

Today, Renee is seventeen with a year-old child on her tired hip. I don’t know if she still smokes pot, but I do know that cigarettes have caught her in their smoky, tantalizing grip. She is attempting to realign her life, trying to get back on track. Renee graduated a year early and is a full-time student at the local community college. She’s proud of these achievements, happy with her “good enough’s” and comfortable with her mediocrity. She was a brilliant girl; she would have done amazing things.

Renee is my birth control and my personal anti-drug. To me, she is a warning of what I could become if I make the wrong choices, or if I fall in the trials of life and do not fight to get back up. I look into her tired brown eyes as she takes a drag on a cigarette, and I see myself in a year if I do not keep my morals strong and firm. For Renee and myself I push to achieve everything that I can. I strive to become the person that she should have been, but didn’t have the strength to see in herself. So that I don’t become a ghost of myself, as she did, I try to accomplish all that I am capable of.