The Facebook Dilemma

I check again. There is no mistaking it. My idle Facebook searches have brought me to this point and suddenly I am frozen with indecision. There she is in the middle of my screen, platinum blonde hair and a seductive look. I check her profile- right age right area as if there was any doubt from that photo, she could only be the daughter of that slut. But there is something in the eyes, the cheekbones that looks familiar. I realize they are mine. I knew they were not my mother’s but this is unnerving. Now what? In an instant I consider my position, I hold all the cards. I have total control since I changed my name she could never find me. I get to choose if she discovers her sister today, next week or never.

My finger hovers above the ‘send message' button. I flash back to when I was 7 and I met her as a three year old for the first time. That was back when he came to see me. I remember the first time he came, cold pavement beneath my naked feet as in my nightie I had run to answer the door one Sunday morning, my mother still in bed. I recognized him from photos I had found covered in dust in the attic. Wordlessly I embraced him clinging to his neck and inhaling the aroma of leather jacket, cigarette smoke, aftershave, and warmth. My father, my hero and, as I would repeatedly discover, my useless waste of tears. I remember meeting her, the perfect mousy blonde toddler. She chatted in toddler-ish and played with a small keyring in the shape of a mouse that my mother had given me calling it ‘litta marse’ and shaking it to make the keys jangle while the adults smoked, conversed about quitting and ignored us.

I look at the screen horrified by the possibility and consider the effects. How would something like this affect her? How would this affect me? Nothing good ever came from meddling with fate. I consider my own dear family and feel a pang of disloyalty to my sweet and wonderfully oblivious brother. Simply a child himself, he has never been told that his father is in fact my step- father and he is not yet old enough to have worked it out. If I tell her what then? We can’t ignore it, we would eventually have to meet and she would become my known sister. That would throw up all sorts of problems.

Perhaps not, I close the laptop as I cannot quite bear to look at her anymore nor can I close the window in which I discovered her. I simply sit and wait, hoping that eventually something in my head will make sense and I will know what to do next.