The Pain Inside

Chapter 15

    It wasn't like it had been the other times. She didn't land with a jolt, it wasn't disorienting. The new world just gradually came into view around her, and as it did Matt disappeared from her arms. As she slowly rose to her feet, Kat was able to immediately identify where she was. The island, the beautiful island, but it was strange. Where the other worlds had grown hazier, indistinct, this one seemed even brighter and more vivid, almost super real, as if when reality had gradually drained from the other worlds it had pooled into this one.

    All around her though the world, once strikingly beautiful, was dying. That was the only way she could think to describe it. The grass was shriveling and turning a faded white with hints of brown and orange. The leaves were gone from the trees, which almost looked shrunken somehow. Nowhere she looked could she see a fox or kitty, or ghosts of her and Matt. And this time there was no voice echoing through the world, no mental letter to be read to her. But there was a path in front of her, and she knew she was meant to follow it.

    Over the next couple minutes she saw more and more signs the world was beginning to decay. Wilted flowers, vines that no longer wound around other plants to reach for the sun but rather lay in loose ropes on the ground near the plants they had once clung to, bushes as barren of leaves as the trees around them, and above it all a dead silence. No animals, no wind or breeze, just the faint noises of her breathing and her own footsteps. The only sounds in all the world came from her.

    She'd just stepped around a ridge of rock when she came face to face with the tiny cabin. Based on its size, it couldn't be more than a room or two, and yet she knew immediately it was where Matt was. Its very walls gave off a faint glow, in a rainbow of colors that were only glimpsed here and there, and could only be truly seen when you looked really close, much like spotting the rainbow in a waterfall. It was the one place left in the world that truly felt alive.

    As she walked towards the front door, it swung open as if it sensed her approach. There were no electronics anywhere around it that could've been the cause, but it was far from the strangest thing she'd seen in these worlds. Hesitantly she took the final few steps to cross the threshold, and found herself in a relatively sparse room. Not five feet to one side stood Matt, staring down at the surface of a wooden table. She had to take a few steps around him to get a glimpse of what he was staring at, and when she did her breath caught. A solid onyx ring, laying right in the middle of the table, seeming to give off a faint glow of its own.

    "I don't know what this is. I don't remember it," Matt said without even looking over at her, his eyes fixed on the ring.

    "I do," she whispered. She hadn't wanted it to happen like this, but there was no holding back now, she had to tell him everything.

    Picking it up in one hand, he turned and held the ring out to her, a questioning look on his face. Very carefully she reached out to take it from him, turning it carefully in her fingers. Had she somehow brought the memory of this ring with her? This was his mind, but it had to have come from her, not from him. No matter, she closed her fingers around it and closed her eyes for a second to steady herself.

    "One day I was shopping, and I walked by a jewelry store," she started, able to hear the quaver of nervousness in her own voice. "And just on impulse I stopped in to browse. And I saw this ring, and I knew it'd be perfect for you. Not gold, or silver, you'd just find those boringly traditional. I knew the onyx was right for you, and it felt like a sign, so... I bought it, and all the while this plan was forming in my head. And I got so excited and... I decided, to myself, that the next day I was going to surprise you, and give you the ring, and ask you to marry me," she told him, her hands trembling enough that she folded them together to keep them from shaking with her nervousness. "I had it all figured out in my head, and I went to sleep so happy and then... The next morning, when I woke up, I freaked out. I lost it, I completely panicked. After all I was thinking about forever, and was I ready for that, could I handle that, I didn't know, I just... I got scared. I panicked, Matt. And that... That was the day I left you."