On Believing in Miracles

True Story.

Aside from my annual prayers to wish away nausea during flu season, I consider myself a hard-science kind of gal, swayed solely by facts and evidence as concrete as the ground beneath us.

Except for this one time.

In January 2001, four days into my semester abroad in Europe, I met my soul-mate friend, a half-joking nickname we quickly attached to our friendship based on our immediate marathon hang-out sessions, our uncanny ability to finish each other's sentences, and our instant connection stronger than any felt prior. A few months later, during a usual afternoon of coffee and cigarettes, my soul-mate friend's face went blank, as if she's seen a (hypothetical) ghost. Once she snapped out of her trance-like state, she explained that six months prior to coming to Europe, she spoke with a reputable psychic over the telephone, a birthday gift from her sister which cost over one-hundred dollars. My soul-mate friend's own skepticism aside, the psychic initially impressed her with accurate details about the room from which my soul-mate friend was calling, and so she listened with only moderate apprehension. The vast majority of their conversation was eventually forgotten, or never remembered in the first place, until our afternoon together that day. All of a sudden, she recalled one of the psychic's premonitions: within the next few years, she would meet a woman named Carly or Carla, with whom she would have an undeniable connection routed in their relationship from a previous life, multiple centuries prior. Carly - or Carla - was once my soul-mate friend's maid, a confidant in an otherwise miserable existence, who provided comfort and companionship where sadness and loneliness triumphed. And so there we were, non-believers of anything unprovable, speechless over the possibility of the impossible, fumbling to light an afternoon worth of cigarettes that would inevitably follow.