The longer I sit here, more things begin to evolve around me. That song is still playing, like it’s stuck on repeat and the air smells vaguely of roses now. I can’t tell if they’re the same roses from that Valentine’s Day, but I guess it doesn’t matter because a rose is still a rose and all that.

I’m not in a void with a starry sky anymore. Blank, white, blinding walls have appeared. No doors, no windows, just walls. There’s a candle on the floor. The golden glow lessens the stark, harsh walls and it calms me.

Maybe I’m caught somewhere in between the past and tomorrow?

I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that I can see Kurt below me, like I’m looking into his apartment from above. He’s currently folding laundry in the careful, meticulous way he’s always done. Socks in the top drawer, flat and folded, never rolled up. Underwear in the second. Undershirts in the third, crisp and perfect, just like they look on the shelves or in their packages. The clothes hanging in his closet are color coordinated and I tilt my head in curiosity as he focuses on my tiny side of the closet. Even with all of the shopping trips Kurt forced me into, his wardrobe still dwarfed mine.

He thumbs the cuff of one of my dress shirts.

I can’t see his face. I wonder how long it’s been since my funeral for him. I don’t know how time is progressing now because for me it seems like it’s just been one long night of storytelling. Has it been weeks? Months, even? There’s no way for me to know.

A box has suddenly appeared.

Kurt’s packing away the memory of me.

I cooked dinner that Valentine’s Day evening. I used a recipe from a cookbook and everything. I made spaces for us at the dinner table by moving some of the rose vases near the door, sure to put the majority of them out of the walkway. The apartment smelled divine and I had just popped the cork on a bottle of champagne when I heard Kurt walk in.

Just as I turned around, I saw him stumble. He caught himself but two vases crashed, smashing all around Kurt’s feet as he braced himself against the nearest wall with his arm.

“Are you oka-”

“Jesus fuck, Blaine!” he shouted, tossing his bag onto the floor, causing two more vases to fall. Pieces of broken crystal made me cringe. “I send you roses, trying to be nice, and this is what you do with them?”

“I didn’t know what else-”

“Look at this!” he cried, kicking over another vase. “How the hell am I supposed to even walk around here?”

“The guys that dropped them off-”

“Does it look like I need a fucking excuse?” he asked, throwing his arms out wide as if I needed more of a demonstration of the chaos that was our living room.

Kurt’s living room.

The living room wasn’t mine, not really.

He rushed over to me and a storm was clouding his face. Terrified, I sat the bottle of champagne and its cork down on the counter, fingers trembling when he finally grasped my upper arm. He tugged me away from the counter and he said:

“Clean it up.”

He shoved me down. My knees hit the floor. I heard something rip and as soon as I felt pain in my kneecap, I knew a bit of glass had cut through my pants.

“I – I need g-gloves or-”

“Clean. It. Up,” he said again, enunciating his words with sharp emphasis on the consonants.

I stared at the mess all around me, large shards of crystal and tiny slivers of glass littering the entryway floor. Stems of broken roses glared up at me.

“C-can I please get some g-”

Kurt slammed a small trashcan down at my side. It wasn’t nearly big enough for the enormous mess around me but clearly I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I began picking up the pieces of glass as carefully as possible, doing my very best to avoid the sharp edges glittering in the light.

Hovering over me as I did so, Kurt’s shadow petrified me. I felt strangely numb while I continued to pick up the largest pieces first and every time I leaned forward or shifted around to get another shard, that same piece of glass cut deeper into my knee. Ignoring the pain as best I could, I forced myself not to cry.

Until, of course, I had to clean the smaller bits. They were difficult to pluck off the ground and apparently I was moving too slowly for Kurt’s liking.

“If this isn’t clean within the next five minutes, you’ll be sleeping on the streets tonight,” he said.

Sleeping on the street was definitely not something I wanted to do so I began moving quicker, scooping the tiny, diamond-like pieces into my palms and dumping them into the trashcan as fast as possible. When it was finally full, Kurt wandered off and promptly returned with another trash bag, gracious enough to hold it open while I threw everything away.

Unbidden, tears began to fall. The sounds of my sniffles joined the harsh sounds of glass in the room as I felt that same glass prick my skin. Blood bubbled up, staining my fingers, palms, and the small shards I disposed of hastily.

Scoop, toss. Scoop, toss. Scoop, toss.

I repeated the same motions for the next few minutes until there was nothing more I could do.

By the time Kurt finally tied off the trash bag, my hands were covered in crimson and I could feel tiny bits of glass lodged in the surface of my skin.

Kurt’s shadow disappeared. I cradled my hands to my chest and cried silently, shoulders shaking with the sobs I refused to give a voice. I heard the scraping of a chair on the kitchen floor and the sound of silverware clinking against a plate.

He ate the dinner I had cooked while I bled and sobbed on the entryway floor.

I was afraid to move. I was afraid to breathe.

Two hours later, we were in the hospital while someone plucked pieces of glass out of my hands and my knee.

“He came home and tripped,” Kurt had said. “I sent him roses and he stumbled on the vases because he didn’t know they were there.”

My eyes remained blank and glassy.

Kurt rubbed a soothing hand on my back when they told me that I had sliced a tendon in one of my fingers. You might never gain full control of that finger again, they said, not without surgery.

When we went home that night, I received no apology. I went to bed without ever having touched the food I had made. We curled up in bed, my back to Kurt’s front, and he kissed the back of my neck.

“Love you,” he whispered.

I stared at the wall.

“Love you, too,” I echoed because I had no choice.

I never played the guitar again.

That was the worst thing to me. I had the surgery, of course, but when I cut my finger that night, I think I lost my heart. Maybe it bled out on the floor or something, I don’t know. Maybe Kurt hid it away from me with that soft ‘I love you’ whispered on the skin of my neck.

Up here, though, I don’t really have a need for a heart.

The room seems to be furnishing itself. It’s odd, really, because there are things I recognize and there are things I don’t. The walls are no longer blank; instead, they’re covered in murals. There’s nothing all that special about the murals, but they’re there. A broad window has formed and I can see the still-starry night if I look outside.

The window doesn’t open and there’s still no door.

The candle that had been on the floor earlier now sits on a glass coffee table, the same coffee table that had been in Kurt’s living room. A long, classy leather sofa is seated beneath the window and it smells nice, almost familiar in a way I don’t understand.

Is heaven making a home for me?

After Valentine’s Day, I stopped doing anything I wanted to do. I stopped going down to the coffee shop on the corner. I stopped allowing myself to think of my old friends. The room Kurt had given me in his apartment became dusty because I no longer went inside.

While Kurt was at work, I cleaned the apartment. I scrubbed the baseboards and dusted every inch of every shelf. The television was never on and I didn’t dare play music. I did the dishes and did my laundry. If I ran out of things to clean, I simply cleaned them again.

The only freedom I allowed myself was a walk around the block once a day.

Kurt always came home, chipper as ever and a smile on his lips. He’d kiss me while I busied myself by making dinner. When he asked me how my day had gone, I’d always tell him that it was fine.

It wasn’t.

The world became bleak and suffocating. I couldn’t keep track of the days. I knew it was the weekend when Kurt was home and he’d take me shopping for more unnecessary clothes and a new guitar I never touched. The weekdays melded together and the months drifted by in a depressing, lonely, gray haze.

I was unhappy. I was terribly unhappy.

And I had nothing. I had no more money, I had no friends, and I had no place to go.

The only time I ever felt alive was when we had sex and even then, the act became repetitive. He would slip inside of me and I’d feel full, complete, and wanted. He touched me gently and whispered pretty things and promised empty things and begged my forgiveness until he came.

When he was done, however, he was done. He didn’t make me come. I suppose it was because he didn’t care anymore.

If he did care, he would have seen my sunken eyes and the weak pallor of my cheeks.

He never said a word.

Eventually, I began to wonder if this is what happened to his previous boyfriends. Did he woo them and suck the life out of them until they turned to ash and drifted into the wind? Did he buy them expensive clothes and forbid them from having friends?

Did he play them the same way he played me, sweet and slow until the crescendo that left behind shredded strings and a hollow body?

Are they all dead, too?

Days and weekends turned to months and all of those months rushed together in a swirl of nothing spectacular at all. I can’t remember holidays or birthdays, not even now, not even here in this place with stars and murals. Those were the dark days, I suppose, the days I guess I wasn’t meant to recall or maybe they were days that my memory buried inside itself.

Perhaps I should have left the house and got a job during the week while Kurt was at work. I thought about doing it more than once. I considered leaving the confines of the prison he had created for me. I should have become a waiter again or perhaps tried for a job at my favorite bookstore. I could have saved up some money and found myself an efficiency apartment in a bad part of town because getting robbed would probably have hurt less than broken glass in my palms.

But I didn’t. I had no energy. I had no will to leave and I had no confidence in myself to make a life in the real world again, not after everything Kurt had done for me.

I desperately wanted to leave but my body never allowed me to do so.

I do recall my twenty-fifth birthday. The only reason I remember it is because it was the first day in over a year that I allowed myself to return to the sanctuary of my little room. It was dark, dank, and dusty. The bedcovers had that scent where it’s like there’s no scent at all and the knickknacks on the wall seemed so foreign, like they had existed in another lifetime, in a world where I was lost but still felt alive.

Kurt didn’t take me out for my birthday. I assumed he had simply forgotten the date and I never mentioned it because I didn’t feel like I had anything to celebrate. Only another year gone, I told myself dully, and I felt like I had aged thirty or forty years.

“You don’t look very happy,” Kurt said, a month after my birthday.

I shrugged, pushing around the pasta on my plate with my fork, lacking the energy to lift my head and look him in the eye.

“It’s because I forgot your birthday, isn’t he?” he asked.

Shrugging again, I dropped my fork. I didn’t tell him he was a month late in mentioning it because we had gone so long without a fight and I refused to be the one to cause one.

“It’s not a big deal,” I told him.

“Of course it is,” he said. “It was your birthday and I was too busy.”

“Really, Kurt, don’t worry about it.”

“I want to make it up to you,” he said, scooting his chair closer to mine. One of his hands settled on my thigh and I repressed a flinch.

It wasn’t that I thought he was going to hurt me, not really. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

It was just a reflex.

“And I think I’ve finally come up with an idea that you’ll love,” he said.

I could hear the smile in his voice. Curious, I finally lifted my head to peer up at his face. His eyes were full of mischief, sparkling like they used to, and that empty cavity in my chest where my heart had been suddenly filled with something like excitement. Small sparks of something like – like feeling flitted through my veins and danced a waltz under my skin.

I hadn’t felt in so very long.

In those few moments, the past seem like a forgotten dream and the scar on my finger where the tendon had been sliced melted back into my flesh, seeping back inside as if it had never been.

Now, of course, I see that my mistake had been allowing myself, just for a few seconds, that scant bit of joy called hope.