To Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

That is the question which assails my mind at the present. From time to time I Google my name (and I have learned some fascinating facts about myself which I will share at some point) and names of old friends which I wish I would have kept in touch with. Through this somewhat stalker-esque application of everyone’s favorite search engine I found the person I believe to be the subject of my Lesbian Spank Inferno post. That was about it until tonight. I tend to engage in this somewhat sad little practice when I am feeling a little lonely and been drinking (For a thirty-two year-old I seem to obsess about my past an awful lot. I am sure my therapist will eventually have fun with that, but back to the matter at hand.)

I guess tonight I was feeling lonely and I had been drinking a little while alternating between reading and seeing how many times I can listen to Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree album before I kill someone. I decided to do a couple of the Google searches for shits-n-giggles and this time I hit the proverbial jack pot. Well, sort of. Every time I play the Google game I put Rachel’s name in (for those of you who are unfamiliar with Rachel and her significance in my life, check my post titles A Couple of Tracks from My Life) and this time I got a valid hit! In the past I had found a couple of posts from her on some nutty Christian website, but they were pretty old and seemed to indicate that she had moved to Oregon. I thought nothing more of it except in my moments of thought that bordered on self-pity. This time Google pulled back the following post on the Nederland High School – Alumni page:

Rachel Cowart Taylor Lindsay
Cypress TX 77433
email: rachel@racheldougsamantha.com
updated: 02/15/05
I didn't graduate with the '94 class, but some of us have been going to school together since we were in Kindergarten! I left NHS to graduate in The Woodlands but I have called Nederland home several times in the past 10 years. After one failed marriage, a beautiful daughter (06/97) and no college degree, I found my lot in life... Environmental Emergency Response. I spent the next 7 years working like crazy and always on call. After 6 years of being a working single mom, I am now a stay at home mom, married July 2004 to the love of my life and working on a second kiddo. I am taking ASL now and hope to start working with deaf children in the Fall. Hope everyone is doing well! Drop me a line sometime.

“Holy crap!” was my first thought, and because I am not a good person I immediately thought, “People that do urls like that bug me.”

What should I do? Immediately I wanted to email her and say hello, but there was this clenching in my guts. I have some very fond and some not so fond memories of Rachel and I am probably guilty of putting her up on a pedestal, and so renewing contact with her after a decade could be weird. Was I even certain it was the right Rachel? I didn’t really see how it could be anyone else, but hell, weirder things have happened. In order to verify my gut instinct I went ahead and plugged the address www.racheldougsamantha.com into my browser and after a couple of clicks there, through the vastness of cyberspace I was looking at pictures of her. The face so familiar to my memory’s eye.

Now do I shoot her an email and say wassup or let sleeping dogs lie? My roommate says to leave it alone. I suspect he wanted to cuss about it as well, but since we were using Yahoo Chat he went for short answer (and yes, we were IMing each other while in the same house, we’re so sad).

I guess I don’t know what I am going to do. For right now I am going to leave it alone, but knowing me I will break down by Wednesday and email her.