straight back to it ⇉ central cee.

counselled.

A clock faintly ticked as Oakley's eyes frantically scanned the countless laminated posters covering the blank office walls promoting mental well-being and healthy living, though hardly convincing. The bright colours and weirdly childish cartoons made his teeth itch like no other - he always felt like a kid in here. In all fairness, the majority of the time that he spent curled up on this green, pleather sofa twiddling his fingers and staring into the painfully yellow lights had been used to relive his childhood days. He often found himself falling back into certain head spaces when reminiscing, it all depended on where his brain was at that day but it happened more often than not. It'd start with rambling and picking out every detail of a memory, which would slowly descend into questions no one was answering until he fell quiet. Amanda would look up from her notebook then and unclick her pen because she knew nothing was coming of the session after. For a while, the boy would simply stare into space or at whatever had caught his eye in the moment, which somehow always turned out to be a pattern in the doctor's shirt, before asking the most random, innocent question. Sometimes a claim of hunger would be made too, or thirst. And the woman would have to remind him she doesn't keep snacks in her office because she counselled adults, him being one of them. It didn't take too long for him to snap out of it again usually, but there had been an occasion where he fell asleep; Amanda had chuckled to herself and called up his emergency contact Shanel unknowingly. Oakley remembered that day clearly as the day she first properly hit him.

The woman had never cared much for his checkups and whatnot, he'd obviously tell her all about it but it all just went in one ear and out the other. So when the doctor had phoned her up that afternoon and explained what had happened with a light chuckle and a joke she was burning up a flame with anger. She couldn't care any less about the red-haired lady with the sweet sing-song voice, she only cared that Oakley had been rude and wasted valuable time: it was disrespectful and someone had to reprimand him of course. The next session following that eventful day, he'd requested to change his emergency contact to his brother. The boys rarely spoke nowadays, all very busy with their own careers but that never changed their loyalty to one another, so he'd asked Wyge who'd happily obliged. Not that he had to be called any time soon, because Oakley spent most of his time focusing on not getting so worked up that he fell into that sort of situation, it was all just precautionary. The thing with his counselling was, it wasn't an awful lot of people telling him what to do to fix himself or assuring him his feelings were natural, it was more Amanda prompting him in the direction of solutions than anything. Most of it was his own leg work because he needed to get used to fixing his problems and faults when they came about. But the situation with Shanel was much different, Amanda quickly realised.

"So, Oaks, tell me about yesterday afternoon."

Oakley's eyes winced at the nickname, one that he was so used to Shanel calling him in the pits of manipulation, and Amanda simply studied his reaction carefully as she pushed her pink framed glasses back up her nose. It was evident that he'd been avoiding talking about the topic, as the past twenty minutes he spent mumbling about a silly rumour he saw on Twitter about him being homophobic and how it annoyed him far too much when he'd actually come here to talk about his ex-girlfriend. Now he wasn't too sure why he called in for this appointment because it was proving to be more counterproductive than anything, until Amanda broke the ice.