The following is a former winner of the Amazing but Incredibly True Story Contest.
Copyright Muse Enterprises for the author, 1998
I met my best friend at a deaf residence high school back in 1986. We connected quickly and strongly. I was in the habit of attending a deaf women's emotional support meeting. At one meeting I noticed amongst the fifteen girls seated at a large round table, one smiling round-faced blonde girl holding a white bible. I was impressed by her courage to carry a bible in front of other teenage girls. As I myself was very spiritual, I was curious about her beliefs.
During the meeting, an art therapist came up to teach us how pictures can reveal our true inner desires and goals in life. The guest speaker instructed us to draw whatever we loved most in life. At the end, after posting all the pictures up on the wall, I noticed there was only one other picture that had a theme similar to mine. I love nature, sunshine, flowers, trees and waterfalls. As each girl presented the story behind her picture, I anxiously looked around to see who had drawn the other picture that was full of nature, sun and flowers. To my delight, the blonde shy smiling girl stood up and shared her vision of life. When it was my turn to present my picture, I noticed the girl with the white bible staring at me intensely. Even the counselor noted how similiar our pictures were. During discussions I learned more about the girl. Her name was Vestie and she had grown up on on a farm in Tennessee. Laughing, I told her I too had grown up on a farm in New Jersey. We drilled each other with tons of questions and found we had more and more in common. We had so much in common, in fact, that it spooked her.
We instantly became best friends. It felt natural. We beamed whenever we were together. People often mistook us for sisters, though we looked nothing alike.
High School passed and college life separated us to two different states, but we kept in touch. I later transferred back to her college. Many parallel events happened. When we were room-mates we would sometimes wake simultaneously in the middle of the night, both thinking the other had called us from our sleep for some reason. We even seemed to have the same dreams at times.
Time passed and I quit my college life, retreated back to my childhood state, then moved out to the West Coast. Vestie and I kept in close contact via phone calls and letters and made many goals to be together someday and to let nothing keep us from reuniting, even if for only a short vacation to rejuvenate our souls.
One day, I had to visit my father to help him with a 3 month project on the East Coast. While in the East, I flew in to visit my mother and other family and friends in New Jersey. I was excited to see Vestie again and invited her to come and visit me since I was only a four hour drive from where she was in school. Her boyfriend called to say she had a bad headache and couldn't come. I got very upset because I'd waited so long to see her, and my mother volunteered out of the blue to drive me to the university.
A very strange thing happened when my mother, brother and I arrived on campus. It was as if some spirit pushed me to one building. I had no idea where she lived, what classes she was taking, or who could refer me to where I might find her. I randomly picked one building and my family and I stepped in and there was Vestie right in front of me in the hallway. For a few seconds she didn't recognize me, then she was very surprised and we hugged. My mother asked her to drive me back to Jersey before the weekend. Vestie, still stuneed, agreed.
I was concerned upon seeing her again, for she looked pale and lifeless. I knew the city was draining her. That was why I had left the school. I had felt as if my life force were being drained. I told her that she needed to get out.
We drove back to my mother's home on the farm I grew up on and spent 4 wonderful days together just being healed by each other's presence. I took a lot of pictures of her, which was unusual as she is not crazy about having her picture taken. We promised we'd visit more often. She said she'd come to visit me at my father's house in few weeks. A few weeks came and went with no sign of her. A month passed, a year passed, then two years. We kept in touch through phone calls and letters, still promising we'd make our dream vacation to Europe someday.
On July 16, 1995, I was back in the Northwest. I drove to drop off a job application, but got incredibly lost. I had already visited the office, so I couldn't understand why I could not relocate it again. I was feeling extremely frustrated, so frustrated that I had to pull over my car and scream just to relieve the tension. I just kept going in circles, and getting lost. I was crying, trying to find my way out of what seemed like a maze, when suddenly I just felt like giving up and just shooting myself in the head. The trip to find the office and my extreme frustration seemed insane. I even read a map, and carefully retraced my routes to try to get to this office but with no success.
I ended up having a hypoglycemic reaction from getting so worked up. I tried to eat some food to bring up my sugar level, but I had parked my car under a tree and fell into a deep insulin shock coma/sleep. I woke up really groggy and felt I was under some intoxicating drug. Feeling so weak and "drunk," I (maybe my guardian angels guided me) somehow managed to find the dumb office and drop off the papers. Then I went home in a very solemn mood.
A couple of days later one of my old deaf high school friends called me up and asked me to meet him at a bookstore. When we met, he announced that Vestie had died on Monday. Shocked, I ran out of the bookstore, not believing him. I had a friend to call up Vestie's father, and he confirmed that Vestie had committed suicide via overdose of prescription medicine and vodka on Monday night at around 6 pm.... which on the West Coast is 3 o'clock in the afternoon . That was when I had been driving around like a maniac lost, looking for the office.
Somehow, I knew... it was as if my soul was dying along with her. Memories of our four day beautiful weekend haunted me. It was as if it had been her way of saying goodbye to me. I believe my spirit had told me to take a whole roll of film of her despite her being camera shy. I believe that we are so bonded that even 3,000 miles away, I was with her, inside her rage against life, and that I felt the frustration with her dead end attempts to find peace and her final surrender.
I flew to Tennessee to be with her grieving family, attend her funeral and say my last goodbyes to my soul sister. A big part of me is buried with her in her coffin. I am not the same. I'm a different person now without her. She is with me in very subtle ways, always around me. When I am stagnating, she pushes me to the right path. Words can't really describe the subtle connection between her on the other side and me on this plane.
I made a vow: that one day, my ashes will be buried next to hers, in afterlife as in life. Nothing will separate us: not time, circumstance, or fate.
To contact the author, write to: 2crow@writeme.com.
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