Supernatural
As a dismally skeptic individual, today I was presented with something of a conundrum. My parents dragged me to a small modest little house in Serdang, where, in a simple procedure that nonetheless defied all logical explanation, I experienced the supernatural.
Heretics like me would call him a witch doctor, but I suppose the right term would be "sinseh", or maybe "holy man". He placed his fingertips on my injured knee (from the Kinabalu trip), probing for the joint, and before I knew what to expect, I felt a jolt of warm electricity surge through my skin and veins - a none-too-weak, self-contained electric surge that followed his fingertips as he healed my knee. I kid you not: I could hear the sizzling of static and electric energy at the point of contact. After that, he set about to improve my blood circulation by applying the same treatment to my pulse points; his electric feather-fingertips touched my temple briefly, and my vision was suddenly strobed with purple lightning.
He sits, this smiling cherubic old man with a comfortably ample belly, in a none-too-comfortable armchair facing his reverent patients. To his right is an empty chair, upon which, so it is claimed, the Goddess Kuan Yin herself sits, guiding his hand. To his left: a glass of purportedly blessed water, which he periodically dabs in the center of his forehead, where one's third eye would be. The quiet hum of Buddhist chants roils peacefully in the background. And there, he heals.
My mind leapt from possibility to impossibility: concealed electrodes in his fingers, conducting elements in the water, batteries packed in silicon to give him the illusion of an ample belly, even hypnosis - anything to explain how someone could send an electric current spontaneously through someone's body; what is more, appear to have complete control over where he applies it. Eventually, I drew a blank.
Great chunks of me are comprised of a granite disbeliever, an unshakable, 18-year-old rock of logical explanation; deep within, however, there are little gold veins that seek neither to disbelieve nor believe, but merely the capability to doubt either way, and today, those miniscule golden strands have given me something timeless.