Georgina Finds Herself.

It usually happens when someone distracts you. 

You’re used to a  certain routine; someone asks a question, and you put the keys in the fruit bowl instead of their usual spot. 

You don’t notice the mistake until the next day when you need to drive to an important meeting. 

The problem is easily fixed by using the spare keys; the lost keys are soon to be found.

Losing yourself is quite a different matter, as Georgina found out.

I’ll fast forward to the end and tell you that her friend Harriet was the one who found her, so now that you know it will be a happy ending, you can relax.

Georgina and Harriet had been friends since that first day at Kindergarten. 

They crashed into each other in the playground, smiled, and a lifelong friendship was born.

They shared the intimate and the mundane and found them of equal interest. They had each other’s backs and their friends called them George and Harry.

Georgina’s parents had money and were ambitions for her. Harriet’s parents lived quietly and just wanted Harriet to be happy.

The friendship storm clouds gathered when Georgina received a scholarship to study at Oxford. If she chose to go, it would separate the friends for the first time in their young lives.

It was a tough decision for Georgina but in the end, she followed her parent’s wishes and took the long flight to the other side of the world.

Of course, there were young men and parties, but Georgina also applied herself and received appropriate results. She was a voracious reader, and this is what started her ordeal.

She shared a room with a girl from one of those tiny islands in Scotland, and both girls struggled with their respective accents, but as usually happens with young people, they laughed a lot and muddled through.

Their room was on the third floor and looked out across the square to the library.

Georgina came from a country that counted it’s recent history in a mere hundred years.

The room that Georgina slept in was part of a building that was constructed more than a hundred years before her country became a country.

She liked to sit in the window on the wide timber sill and devour a book.

From where she was sitting she saw the whole thing, or to be more accurate, she saw the aftermath.

She told the authorities what she had seen and from then on things went downhill very fast indeed. 

She found herself in the middle of a controversy that would consume the college and almost everyone in it, and peace would not return to anyone’s life for many months.

Being a foreign student, suspicion fell on her. Her motives were questioned, and her character came under scrutiny. She had simply told the truth and said what she saw and now her life was in turmoil. She was not yet lost, but she was losing. Far from home and far from the strength of her friends and her family she struggled to understand what was happening.

When the situation seemed to be at its darkest, there came a knock on her door. 

She opened the door, and there stood Harriet. 

They smiled at each other as they had done all those years ago. 

Harriet gathered her up and led her out of that room and within a couple of hours the two girls were airborne on the first leg of a long flight back to their homeland. 

They had barely spoken. 

They would not be separated again by distance or circumstance.

After a short holiday by the sea, Georgina resumed her studies. 

Harriet started work at a small shop located very near to the university, and the two girls shared a house with a couple of noisy young men.

Careers and boys and husbands and babies and homes and families followed, but Georgina never again became lost. 

She didn’t exactly find herself; Harriet did it for her, but that was the next best thing.

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As we all know there are two things in life that sustain a writer……. constant praise and adulation……..and of course, coffee. I know, that’s three…… I’m a writer, not a mathematician…….. my coffee bill is enormous…… help!!

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