Talk to Me [The Mentalist]

11

Sophie and I sat in silence just getting warmed by the sun. Neither she nor I tried to break the silence up to now.

I thought about what she said to me; me getting into people's private life. I never really thought about how uncomfortable they could have felt. I myself was used to getting rid of cameras and journalists. And if they got to uncomfortable I called my lawyers to get them off me for good. Most of them didn't try twice, but each one still was replaced by what felt like at least two.

But all in all very few information about me or my family were ever published at all. I had managed to just let them feel like they got oh so interesting news.

I couldn't hide a small grin creeping across my face. The press people acted like such idiots. Sometimes I just told them what I would make for dinner and they treated it like information about Area 51.

I just then realized that it would be the first time in weeks that I just smiled because of a happy memory. Sophie must have noticed, because she now broke the silence. "The first thing to do is you accepting everything that happened."

I wanted to protest, but she raised her hand for me to stay silent. "You will remember your family a lot and there is nothing wrong about it. You will miss them and this feeling won't lessen. And there's nothing wrong about that either. But what would be wrong is holding on to these feelings of missing and anger and sadness."

I wanted to protest to, tell her she was wrong, that I was coping just fine. But it would have been a lie. And I felt like she could see right through my mind. I thought about what she had said earlier and what I had decided: accepting help. It was worth a try. "But I do miss them. How could I possibly not focus on that?"

"You loved them. Focus on your love, all positive emotions you can combine with them. Happiness, fun, love, security." Slowly I began to feel the desperation and every bad thing again. "Imagine Angela and Charlotte sitting at one of those tables and laughing over something. You would want them being happy, right?

I eyed one of the empty tables. Tears began to form in my eyes. "Of course I want them to. Why wouldn't I? But how can they be, if they'd been ripped out of life so cruelly?"

"Do you believe in afterlife?" I hesitated. I knew there was kind of an afterlife. I talked to souls enough to know and I was in a clear state of mind nonetheless, so I wasn't going crazy hearing voices. But on the other hand I had decided on denying psychic abilities, which would contain not believing in such stuff, right?

"No, I don't think something like that exists." I spoke hesitantly. I feared Sophie would see right through my lie, but either she didn't or she didn't want to.

"If you don't believe that this exists, then dead people just don't exist anymore. What doesn't exist can't have any emotions of happiness or sadness, pain or luck. So what would it matter, if the ending was cruel when nothing matters after death?"

"I... I suppose, it wouldn't matter..." But it mattered! One of the victims I had seen in my month with the CBI had howled in my head all the time. She hadn't even spoken in words but her pain had been so intense, that I had felt part of it.

I remembered the pain. And I couldn't stop imagining the pain Angela must have felt. The numerous wounds in her body projected a vivid image in my mind. Her voice calling me just moments after her death had been strangely distorted. Only now I realized it had been her pain doing that.

My thoughts led me like every so often back to that event. And like every time the images became too much for me to cope and I felt unable to move or even breathe.

I screamed. Why wouldn't these images leave my mind? Why couldn't I do anything to stop them? I couldn't help but imagining how the pain had been done to them. I wanted to stop it. The dark figure in my thoughts just kept hitting a sharp knife into their bodies. I wanted to grab that figure, see who he was, and kill him for God's sake. But I was unable to move.

I grew cold, exhausted. I heard nothing but my own screams and Charlotte screaming. She screamed like when she had broken her arm once in the park. I knew that noise was just a memory, but it nonetheless it was too vivid. I couldn't shut out the pain and everything else.