Aurelio's Dilemma

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

For the first few minutes of therapy, Aurelio didn't open his mouth. Didn't respond to his therapist's questions and gentle prodding. Didn't even look her in the eye. He tapped his foot against the floor incessantly, trying to figure out the best way to explain the whole situation.

He chose blurting.

"I think I'm hallucinating," Aurelio said. "My girlfriend turned out Matt's girlfriend, even though I was dating her for the past week. I literally kissed her. I still remember it. I still remember the feeling, but she tells me that it didn't happen and that she kissed Matt. My dad told me that he started smoking when he was fourteen when his father abandoned him, and then my mom and uncle tell me that couldn't have happened because his dad died when he was twelve."

And Aurelio told her all the rest. Everything he told Leslie. He left no detail unsaid.

At last, Aurelio raised his chin and glanced at the therapist. She was hunched forward, elbows on the table, hands interlocked beneath her chin. A frown slanted her brows. When the silence stretched on for a while, she leant back in her seat and stared at the paper she took notes on with an expression that was frighteningly serious.

Aurelio couldn't tell what conclusion she had drawn, if any.

"Okay," she said, nodding. She looked at Aurelio. "I see what's happening."

Aurelio frowned unsurely.

She did?

"When's the last time you ate and drank enough?"

Aurelio shrugged. "Ever since the I saw the car crash on the news."

"The last time you slept properly?"

"Haven't slept well in a week and a half now."

"And have you had any rest?"

"It's summer," Aurelio said. "I don't have anything to do, so I'm pretty much resting all the time."

"When I say rest," the therapist said, raising a brow, "I mean actually feeling relaxed. Not anxious."

Aurelio let out a quivering breath. "I...I forgot what it feels like to be relaxed."

The therapist nodded again. "So, are you surprised?"

Aurelio looked up with wide, startled eyes. "Hm?"

"You haven't been sleeping, you haven't been eating, you haven't been drinking, and you haven't had rest for more than a week now. Are you surprised that you don't feel well? Are you surprised that your brain can't function normally?"

Aurelio didn't know why, but something irked him about how she worded this. Maybe what irked him was that it made sense, that for a moment, he didn't know how to respond.

"It's not...This is more than not feeling well," he said. "There are things that happened in my head that didn't actually happen in real life. A full week of me hallucinating interactions with the people in my life while in reality something completely different was happening. This can't be just the anxiety." He frowned. "And this stuff has been happening before I stopped sleeping and eating and all of that. I was already dating Blair and my dad already smoked the day I saw the car crash. There's something clearly wrong here, and I'm sure resting and sleeping won't fix it."

"Have you tried it?"

Aurelio set his jaw. "Kind of. It didn't work. I told you that's not the problem."

"I think you should try it first, okay?" the therapist said. "Just try to relax and sleep and eat properly. It might help. Consider this a first-line treatment."

"I just said that all of this bullshit started before I stopped sleeping and eating. Before! I just didn't realize it at that time."

The therapist's brow arched the slightest bit, as if in subtle warning, and Aurelio realized he had leaned forward, hands gripping the armrests. He settled down in his seat again. A few moments of nerve-wrecking silence passed.

"Aurelio," she said. "So what do you want? Do you want me to refer you to a psychiatrist right away? Do you want to go on meds right now just so this ends? Step by step. I understand that you're tired of the situation, but you just now told me about it. So I'll recommend the first-line treatment, and we'll see how it goes."

Aurelio looked away. In a way she was right, but also wrong, because her perspective was so different than his.

"No," he said.

"What?"

"No, no , no. You can't tell me that. You can't act like hallucinating and mixing up and forgetting the details of your life is a normal consequence of some sleep-deprivation. Okay? You just can't."

"Sleep-deprivation can make you hallucinate."

"I know that. But this is different, and I wasn't even a hundred percent sleep-deprived. I slept a few hours here and there." 

"Like I said: step by step. We'll see what happens when you rest properly."

"...Are you even real?"

"What?"

"If I could hallucinate dating a girl," Aurelio mumbled, leaning a little forward again, squinting at the therapist. "If I could hallucinate an entire conversation with my dad about something that I literally also hallucinated, then it's possible I'm hallucinating this too. I never even wanted therapy. Holy shit." He started standing up, and his knees felt a little weak. "Is that why therapy never worked for me? Because I was never really getting it?"

Aurelio laughed shakily while he walked to the door. The therapist followed him, and she touched his arm. He pushed her off. "You're not real," he said as he looked at her and her expressionless face. He placed a hand where she her fingers had grabbed him. "You can't be real."

"Aurelio, come back here," she said. "I'm gonna call your parents."

Aurelio opened the door and stepped out, then he glanced over his shoulder into the office again. "Call them if you're real."

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