Door No. 8

Door Number Six - Soul Journeying (2)

"Oh, thank God! I was really worried that you might be dead!" Taylor breathed a deep sigh of relief at the sight of her neighbor. He was sitting at the large table in the middle of the reading room, half-buried in a book.

"Why would I be dead?" he asked, genuinely surprised.

Taylor shook her head to chase away the silliness of the comment.

"It has been known to happen," he commented, reverting the conversation back to worry. "Hence the preparation."

"I thought the preparation was for me!" Taylor blurted, shocked.

"The preparation was also for you," he replied. The laconic conversation had started to irritate Taylor, especially since the experiment seemed to have entailed a lot more risk than she was comfortable taking. His eyes met her belligerent gaze and he felt compelled to explain.

"You know? Sometimes an experienced swimmer rushes to the rescue of a person who has ventured out in deep waters without knowing how to swim. The experienced swimmer is so confident in his abilities that he underestimates the strength with which a person who believes they're drowning will hold on to him, as their last hope. The drowning person often struggles, doing the exact opposite of what will keep them afloat, and can drag the experienced swimmer under. It turns out instinctive reactions are not always your best hope for survival, huh?" he turned towards her to see if the drowning person analogy had fallen a bit harsh. "The sad part is that it would be almost effortless for the experienced swimmer to pull the drowning person to safety, if they calmed down enough to keep their heads above water. Bodies naturally float, and all it takes is for the person to do nothing, but it never happens, because everyone believes acting out is the only way out of a crisis." He looked at Taylor, whose eyes had started to be overshadowed by concern, an answered quickly, to nip any potential guilt in the bud. "We undergo extensive training for situations just like this, they are to be expected. The problem is, you never know what you're going to encounter, hell or high water, so to speak. Nobody can anticipate every possibility. I once traveled with a girl whose hidden emotions were trapped by the lava flows of an active volcano, with no way out."

"What happened to her?" Taylor asked, worried.

"That is not your life," he retorted, surprisingly stern. "You don't have the rights to its details!"

"Then don't give them to me, Jeez!" Taylor thought, trying to think up a change of subject.

"The point of this experience, fraught with risk as it may have been," he gave her a morose stare, "was to realize that whether you acknowledge your emotions or not, they're still a part of you and they will mold your life. The emotions that stay hidden, by their very nature, usually create chaos and damage. It isn't that difficult to understand why that would happen; people don't normally lock up and throw away the key to a place where they keep things they are proud of. That's why I'm still a little puzzled by that beautiful world of yours. I'm trying to figure out why you would bury a place like that. Sure, the white waters are a bit out of control, but what we found there was a treasure, not a dump heap. Care to explain?"

"As I mentioned before, I have never seen that place in my life, in my mind or otherwise," Taylor frowned, embarrassed to have her mind turned inside out for public viewing.

"You don't have any thoughts or feelings about it?" he probed.

"I don't know, it's nice, I guess," she conceded.

"Then why do you keep it hidden?" he pressed on.

"Not everything that's hidden is bad," she tried to circumvent the question, managing only to incite more curiosity. "You know, this is an outrageous invasion of privacy! So much for having the rights to one's life details! Apparently that only applies to other people!"