The Pain Inside

Chapter 6

"Why did she leave you?" Kat asked. She needed to know what he thought, how he felt about what she'd done. Whether he really understood.

Instead Matt pushed back from the desk, standing up from his chair. His face was overwhelmed with emotions. "Sorry doc. That's the end of our session for today."

Kat started to voice an objection, to tell him they needed to go on, when the world around her shifted. It wasn't like falling this time, things didn't turn chaotic. One minute she was sitting in that interrogation room, the next she was sitting on a rock beneath a moonlit sky, with Matt nowhere to be seen. It only took a cursory glance around to tell her that she was back on the island, the beautiful island she'd been on earlier.

Did this mean some part of Matt had made a conscious choice to turn the focus elsewhere, to a different place? Perhaps he hadn't been able to handle being in that room anymore. Kat already knew what it had been meant to represent. She'd figured it out only a short while in. The psychiatric hospital, with Matt as a patient speaking to a doctor, was his need to finally be able to tell someone about his problems, to open up about it all. He'd been holding it all in for so long that some part of him needed to let go and talk. That craved catharsis. To release some truths he probably hadn't even shared with the psychiatrists and therapists who'd been medicating him all these years. But it wasn't easy to open up all at once. Perhaps he'd gone as far as he could, to start.

At least she knew now, about his pain, about the suffering he'd hidden from her. How could she have missed it, all that time? She thought she'd known him better than anybody, and in a way maybe she had. But there'd still been so much she was simply clueless to. Could she have helped him more, had she known? Could she have made things better for him, somehow? It almost made her wonder, was it right what she was doing, trying to bring him back to the world of the waking, if that was what it was like for him? But every instinct she had immediately screamed yes, she had to bring him back. There had to be some way to make things better, to make things right together between them. She could help him, she knew she could, if she was just given the chance. Part of her was mad that he'd never given her that chance before. But she didn't have it in her heart to blame him. He hadn't been hiding things from her out of malice, or to cover up some wrongdoing, he'd just wanted her to be as happy as she could be. She didn't agree with his actions, but she knew he'd had good intentions. He'd just wanted to protect her from the pain he felt.

As Kat studied the area around her, she realized there was no path for her to follow, this time. The rock she was sitting on was at the edge of a meadow to one side, and a forest to the other. All across the meadow were wildflowers, in a beautiful array of colors. She could hear the leaves of the trees rustling in a soft breeze. It seemed the perfect place to stop and rest for awhile, but she knew she couldn't. Every step she took through these segments of Matthew's mind were steps closer to him. And she wasn't going to waste a single moment until she was able to reach him. All she needed now was to figure out where on the island he was, which direction would lead her to him.

Then she caught a glimpse of it, a flash of silver fur awash in the glow of the moonlight. Her eyes immediately tracked towards it and there, at the edge of the meadow ahead of her, a fox. The fox stared at her for a few seconds, let out a single yip, and then turned and bounded into the trees, disappearing from view. Could it have been saying 'Here I am, follow me'? Only one way to find out.

Kat rose from the rock and began to jog over to where she'd seen the fox, but she'd only gotten halfway there when she heard his voice. It was resonating through everything, just as it had the last time. "Kat, it's been so strange lately, and I don't know why. I keep... I don't know... Sensing you, sensing your presence. Sometimes it's like I can hear your voice, or feel you nearby. That's impossible isn't it? I'm just imaging things, aren't I? You can't be dead too. But just a few minutes ago I thought for a split second I smelled you, that perfume you'd always wear, and just the scent of you was enough to bring tears to my eyes."