Meant To Be ...

“Good things happen when you least expect them!” is a quote we both had heard, but it was not manifested in our lives so profoundly until the day we met. It was at a mutual friend’s house, a small party on a Sunday night and the last thing either of us had in mind was meeting his/her missing piece. When we met, everything seemed ordinary at first but turned into something unusual at a glimpse of an eye. Our encounter was one of those incidents that cannot be called a coincidence. Each one of us found in the other person what he/she was dreaming of, for many years. We kept receiving signals from the universe, telling us we belong to each other...! It seemed like we both knew each other for a long time, not like old friends, but like old souls from a past life. Maybe we could tell what happened but the secrets we whispered in each others’ ears cannot be uttered in words...

On the surface, it happened quite simple; Mahmoud proposed to Sogol and a bystander took a picture. The true story, however, is much more profound. It was a detour to Mt. Sequoyah and its Cross, which overlooks the town. Mahmoud got down on one knee and Sogol said “Yes”, while the bystander was taking pictures of this special moment. What we learned then was so astonishing that we could not help but believe someone else was orchestrating the events around us... The bystander told us he had just lost his job and he was in Fayetteville to attend the funeral of an old friend. He was completely hopeless but it was a “calling”, he said, that made him change his path to Mt. Sequoyah. As he started crying, he told us now he knows what the calling was about. For him, it was a message of hope and life after sadness and death, and for us it was a sign that our union was meant to be…