"And how did that make you feel?"
By now, Shane was well familiar with the problem of mental health care in rural USA: there was no mental health care in rural USA. When one was as messed-up in the head as Shane felt just then, one had three options: the 'city option,' the 'budget option,' or the church. Driving all the way into Denver was expensive and time-consuming. A local alternative was actually realistic for people of Shane's location and means, but only with the caveat that you get what you pay for. As for the church - well, Shane knew that the church was not a place for people with real health problems to get better. Fortunately, so did his guardians.
Although, the budget option wasn't much different.
"Well, Mr. Dan," the boy replied with a sigh and a monotone mumble, "Who are you asking?" Shane had to give a little chuckle at the absurdity of his own question because if he didn't laugh at it, he thought he would just go crazier.
The smile the boy's dark jesthad put on Mr. Dan's face was probably supposed to be calming and friendly, but he suspected it was just as wry as his 'joke' had been. "I'm asking you, Shane. You're the only one here."
God, Shane couldn't help that everything about this man just bugged him. It felt like he was being condescended to whenever the geezer leaned forward and rested his clasped hands on his desk, like he had just now. The boy thought he was being surveyed and solved like a puzzle every time he actually tried giving a straight answer. He was convinced that every time he was asked how he felt, it was never coming from empathy or compassion; it was only a way to get a better look inside his head for completely pragmatic reasons... or, perhaps, just to fill session time. He hated how small a deal Mr. Dan made of something that Shane thought was a major issue; this quack treated it all like a minor inconvenience… to himself. The man didn't even care to display any credentials on his wall like most in the profession. Shane suspected the reason was whatever they were, if any, had nothing to do with his field.
"Can we please talk about something else?"
"Of course," Mr. Dan acquiesced, "How is school going? You were making good progress there last time we spoke."
Finally, thought the boy, something he could give actually good news about. Shane sat up a bit in his armchair and answered in a more expressive tone, "Yeah, better. Um, the mood swings are still really, really distracting, though. Like…" The boy trailed off because he needed time to think about how to describe it. "I got an A on that physics test. And I didn't think I would, 'cause…" he hesitated but ultimately decided to say it. Screw it . Even if Shane detested the fact this 'therapist' wasn't a competent mental health professional, saying it to anyone felt at least a smidge better. "…it got kind of bad for me that day. Somewhere like halfway through, I got this- like, this really giddy, head-in-the-clouds sorta feeling." The memory of it alone actually made the boy smile a little, even despite being forced to spill his guts to a man he didn't trust in a room that was just a bit too gloomy lighting wise and filled with a suspicious number of crosses. "And, I mean, I guess I should be happy it wasn't one of the negative mood swings I get, but it was really hard to focus on the test or the class at that point."
Shane went on, "I just did my best, but around, like, the second-to-last question, I got… detached."
"'Detached?'"
"Uh… from reality," the young man clarified, "I think." This wasn't the first time the reported this feeling (it was a big part of what brought him here), but it was still a bit uncomfortable for him to talk about. He knew perfectly well what people would think of other people who reported his sorts of symptoms - heck, what he thought of them, too. "So, I spaced out and slipped into that- I guess 'fantasy?' I still had the giddy feeling, and I was in this fantasy that I was over some empty countryside and just… flying."
Mr. Dan interrupted to clarify, "Do you mean in a plane?"
"No, not in anything," the boy snapped.
Do you even read your dumb notes?
"I'm just… flying. On my own." The corners of Shane's mouth drifted upward as he let the memory replay in his head like the best scene from his favorite movie. He leaned back in his chair and didn't even realize he was now staring out the window. Even though the sun was at an angle that wouldn't let much light into this dreary room, there was a lovely view of bright, healthy grass and, far behind it, a dark outline of the Rockies. Shane's heart was already racing as he recalled what they looked like from his imagined bird's eye view. "I just saw everything from thousands of feet up. It was really, really windy, and all I could hear was wind just rushing past my ears and the sounds of my own thoughts. I couldn't see any signs of civilization or any way to get down, but I wasn't scared. It felt like a good thing at the time. I was… liberated. And it lasted almost through the end of the test. But just before I 'came back,' I felt really, really scared. Like… guilty." That was where the happy associations with the memory ended. "I didn't start to fall. It was more like a dive. I just got this overwhelming sense that I'd made a big mistake and wasn't supposed to be there. Then I blinked, and the bell was ringing."
Shane didn't come down from the high of the memory right away, but in the end he most certainly did. He blinked, and his perspective shifted. He was in a slightly too dark room, pouring his guts out to the sorriest substitute Colorado had for a psychiatrist. As if just to make it worse, as always, Shane was the only one to say anything meaningful. When the boy stopped, the therapist didn't start. He just sat back in his creaky armchair, folded his hands in front of his body, and maintained eye contact with the boy like he had been expecting Shane to carry on. Failing that, Shane caught him shifting his gaze around the room - to the ceiling above, to the bookcase behind the boy, to the notebook on his desk that they both know he hadn't opened or written in all session. "So..." Shane tried to break the silence, "…did you want to talk about my latest schizophrenic break, or-"
"Oh, heavens, no," Mr. Dan was quick to rebuff, "Shane, I don't think you're schizophrenic. Nothing of the sort." The man smiled kindly and leaned in forward toward his patient. "You're not 'sick' or 'broken' or anything like that. You know, many people in my church have been blessed with visions-"
"-We're done here."
At least it was a beautiful day to sit alone on the grass outside a rural office building and fume. Shane only caught one cloud drifting by while he waited, and it was one of those really thick and puffy ones. Cumulus, he knew they were called. Being just the one, it looked less like an obstruction to his view than a decoration upon it. Other than that, there was nothing between the boy and the sun, which in its current position looked set to keep the sky bright and blue for a couple more hours yet. It was almost a little too hot, but a constant, gentle breeze on his face only lightly disturbed his short and neat black hair and offset any would-be excessive heat. He didn't know if he could call it 'calming,' but it did beat the same situation in a thunderstorm. Lucky, because Shane's ride home still had a ways to travel.
Prick, he jabbed at the quack, Why do the Rashids even send me to this guy? He does nothing but sit there and get paid for the pleasure! The boy huffed out his nose and began to idly scoop up some of the fine dirt he was sitting on just to watch it flow through the openings between his fingers. He rubbed what didn't fall between his fingertips, just acting mildly curious about the texture since what else was there to do right about then?
He blinked, and when the teen next opened his eyes the quiet breeze he had been enjoying earlier was now a roaring gale. Shane recognized instantly what had happened: it was another one of those 'visions.' Actually, the boy was happy to have this one, as it immediately shared similarities of the last one that had left him with such happy memories. The view, however, was not the same. Instead of flying, Shane was hovering. Instead of being over the Rockies, now they were miles away from his vision. And yet, despite them appearing about as far away now as they did from his real self, Shane was somehow able to perceive the mountains in much sharper detail. Now he was able to pick out individual trees and larger boulders even from miles out without that 'foggy' filter the naked eye should impose on distant large objects. It was as if he were gazing at the land through the lens of a high-end camera.
Shane's gaze shifted downward without meaning to; he was never able to control where he was looking during these experiences. Only now did the boy understand how high off the ground he really was. Heck, the ground was darn near as far from him as the mountains! And yet, these superior eyes through which Shane was now perceiving the world could pick out individual blades of grass, leaves on trees, and probably the whites in the eyes of a hare had there been any in view. He was over a road now in a pretty unpopulated area. It was a straight two-lane country road that stretched for at least a half-mile each way before passing another human structure. More compelling, though, was the one right beneath him. 'Shane's' eyes were laser-focused on the dark grey roof of what could reasonably have been mistaken for an old-fashioned schoolhouse, originally built for one class and teacher. In fact, the only thing that distinguished the edifice from exactly that was a cheap lawn sign on the front grass advertising that it was, in fact, a place of business: Daniel Reed's Counseling And Therapy Solutions.
Just as Shane recognized the building, his focus was made to shift onto its front lawn. There, what held the spectator's interest was another teenage boy who had parked himself a few feet from the building's driveway. He was clad in a bright orange plaid button shirt, unbuttoned and exposing the plain white tee beneath. The overshirt billowed a little in the lighter breeze on the ground. Shane could even make out individual strands of short and neat hair that had caught the wind, too, as its dark black contrasted well against the unshadowed ground and the boy's own very fair skin. That breeze was making it just chilly enough that the boy was right to be wearing bright blue jeans instead of shorts. Clearly he knew a thing or two about the outdoors, going by his dirty, worn hiking shoes. Going by his height and face - as he had been gazing idly up at the sky all this time - Shane would have put his age somewhere around 17 years.
The truth is Shane recognized all of these features about this boy right away, and yet he needed a couple extra seconds to recognize his identity. As soon as he realized he was looking at his own self from a top-down view, Shane experienced an overwhelming sense of longing, as if wanting to land and go meet this person. He would have struggled to describe how he knew the difference, but something instinctual in Shane knew those emotions were not his own. He knew that he was still experiencing his own awe and confusion at the same time that something else was imposing its own childlike excitement and desire upon him. Just to be sure of what he was seeing, Shane told his body to wave at the 'camera' so to speak.
Fortunately, Shane still controlled his own body even if he was now seeing it from a third person point of view. His arm raised itself and reached up toward the sky, palm open, as if trying to keep the sun out of his eyes in order to percieve just what was perceiving him. Unfortunately, at the time he could only see through this 'other' pair of eyes over which Shane had no control. Now that he had gone and left no doubt for himself what he was seeing, the teen wanted for once to end this vision of flight in order to glimpse that which was glimpsing him. For the first time, though, he considered that maybe there was some way of reaching out. If perhaps Shane was sharing with some other mind, then he reasoned it should have known when he made a conscious effort to reach out with the following thought: Is someone there?