Written for Ms Florence Maestes; God keep you

Lost Girls don’t go to Girl Scout meetings or slumber parties. Lost Girls go to the corner of Fifth and Main to fix, or hook a trick. They juggle Johns. Lost Girls don’t sit at the Thanksgiving day table with the adults or the kids. They eat a hotdog from 7-11, and wash it down with a Red Bull, prior to returning to the track on Central.

Lost Girls call home with their Androids with pre-paid minutes to assure their moms that they are safe and eating well, and things are working out just swimmingly with her new beau. Mothers of Lost Girls believe everything stinking thing they ever hear over Lost Girl’s phone, because they are just so eternally grateful that she called at all.

Lost Girls just want to be found.

Next time you see a drug addicted hooker on the beat, close your eyes and picture your favorite memory of your daughter as a small child. Perhaps she was dancing in the living room late in the eventing before bed, dressed in her princess jammies, because that’s what she was after all, a little princess. Now open your eyes and see the hooker again, and imagine your own daughter lost somewhere in her. Is it even possible?

She is back in there somewhere, that little princess child, once a million miles away from being an adult, and from suffering the many afflictions that haunt us grown-ups. The true sadness, the sadness that vexes me, is that with so many of these women, we have to look back very far, because their innocence existed very long ago, and only for a very short time. But that is not the case with OUR own daughters; no, not the case at all—-right?

Our own daughters are not like those throw-away, disposable daughters, addicted and hooking in the streets and such. What are they thinking? What were they thinking? Did they ever thing at all, them? Our daughters grew up in loving homes, went to dance class in the evenings, went to picnics on weekends with friends and family, went to Bible study on Sundays, went to school all day and every day of the school week… so they would not turn out like them Lost Girls.