Day 025: Thursday 11th October, 2012
Softly, Softly (South Carolina)

"How about The Notebook?"

"A beautiful love story like that? You're softening, Kurt."

"What's beautiful about it is the cinematography. Something I can aspire to."



"I won't be long," Kurt said, already unclipping his seat belt as he cut the engine. "Just wait here?"

"Where are we?" Blaine asked. He glanced through the windshield at the other cars in the parking lot.

"Just something I need to see," Kurt muttered, grabbing his phone from the dashboard and repeating, "I won't be long."

"Kurt, stop," Blaine said, reaching across and taking Kurt's arm. "Why are we here?"

Kurt paused, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. He slipped his arm out of Blaine's grasp and, just before he opened the door and hopped out of the cab, simply said, "This is Mom's alma mater."

He walked quickly up Greene Street, following the directions he pulled up on his phone and hoping that his dad hadn't chosen today to check their progress on the GPS. It was a beautiful sunny day, but Kurt struggled to feel the warmth beating down upon him as he made his way closer to the campus proper. The two events that had led to Kurt cutting through downtown Columbia instead of heading straight to Sesquicentennial State Park were, by rights, inconsequential. Nothing on their own: a pair of fleeting reminders of the past he tried not to think too much about—a brief sting to the heart and mind, but ultimately like raindrops slowly rolling from roof tiles. In quick succession, however, was another matter entirely.

It had all begun with the song that cut a swath through the radio static as they passed state lines, Blaine reaching over to turn it up and shimmy in his seat.

"And I know that this must be heaven, how could so much love be inside of you?" Stevie Wonder had sung, his voice as full of mirth and joy as Kurt remembered: sitting at the kitchen table when he was still young enough that his feet didn't quite reach the linoleum and watching his parents dance; later, joining his dad in his mother's place as she sat, hands on her heaving belly and giggling as Kurt tried to teach his father proper turn-out.

He had reached over to change the station but withdrew at the last moment, letting it in and feeling the wistful pain instead of pushing it away. His grip on the steering wheel had remained tight until his fingers were aching from it.

The first time they'd passed a sign for the University of South Carolina bearing the legend 'Go Gamecocks!' Blaine had said, "Oh my god. It's too easy, right?"

"Way too easy," Kurt had replied offhandedly, before doing a double-take and craning his neck around as they'd sped past, another memory of his mom—shuffling around the house with a cold, the long sleeves of her USC sweatshirt hanging over her hands—rising in the forefront of his mind and leaving him with the feeling of having the breath punched from his chest. He remembered crawling up onto the couch beside her as she blew her nose and tracing the letters on her sweatshirt with the tip of his index finger, a rerun of an old American Bandstand episode playing in the background. He'd asked for a story, and she'd told him about the fountain where she had first met Kurt's dad.

Dappled sunlight playing across the sidewalk, he glanced up at the blue sky through the trees and squared his shoulders as he drew closer to where he could already hear the fountain over passing cars and small groups of chattering students apparently heading home for the day. As he passed from beneath the cover of the trees and sunshine broke over him once more, he wrapped his arms around himself and crossed the terrace with long strides.

Standing at the edge of the fountain, Kurt expected to feel more of a sense of closure, peace, anything.

He felt nothing. What he had was only memories of stories told to him, not memories of his own. This place meant nothing to him anymore, even though one day many years ago it had felt like a magical promised land.

Exhaling deeply, he sat down on the very edge of the low wall that bordered the fountain and ran the tips of his fingers back and forth through the cool water, trying and failing to keep his mind blank. His thoughts were weighted heavily with something that had been creeping in the recesses of his mind since driving past the cemetery the day he and Blaine had left Brunswick, keeping to the shadows and biding its time mostly out of sight, but always a presence that Kurt could feel.

"Excuse me," came a gruff voice from somewhere above him, and as Kurt looked up to find its source, he shielded his eyes from the sun's glare and found himself face to face with a man who looked like a professor approaching retirement age. His hair and mustache were light gray fading into white, and he was clad in a tweed jacket one would expect to see on any stereotypical movie professor. With a genial smile that reminded Kurt of Blaine's grandfather, the gentleman gestured to the wall next to Kurt. "Would you mind if I sit?"

"Of course not, please," he answered.

"These old legs are certainly not what they used to be," the man said as he sat down, his voice holding a mild South Carolina accent. For a moment, he regarded Kurt with appraising eyes. "You're not a student here, are you?"

"What gave me away?" Kurt asked, suddenly wondering if he was breaking a rule.

"Ah, I'm just good with faces," the man said, waving him off. "You do look remarkably like one of my ex-students, though." After a somewhat awkward pause, the man held out his hand. "John Goldman, professor of psychology."

"Kurt Hummel, nice to meet you."

"Hummel?" John repeated, and Kurt nodded. "Tell me, you wouldn't happen to be related to Elizabeth Sheridan, would you?"

Kurt froze, breath catching in his chest. "That was my mother's maiden name."

"I knew it. I knew it!" John exclaimed, his lined face lighting up. "I never forget a face, and you look just like her."

"Did you—was she a student of yours?"

"Indeed she was. One of my favorites, though I'd deny it if anyone ever asked me. How is she these days, is she well?"

"I—"

It was the same every time—the throb and stutter in his heart, the thickness in his throat—and Kurt swallowed convulsively, hungry with a sudden need to learn more about his mom from someone whose memories of her weren't colored by the tragedy of her death.

"She died when I was eight," Kurt said, steeling himself to give the same explanation his father had recited by rote to every last person that had called their house in the weeks afterward. "She and my dad were on their way back from a Lamaze class one night, and they hit a patch of ice and spun out of control. My dad was fine, just a couple of bruises, but there just... Wasn't anything they could do for her."

"Oh, my. I'm so very sorry to hear that," John said gravely. "And she was pregnant?"

"With my baby sister. There was a, um... They couldn't save them both so they tried to save my mom, but... Her heart stopped, and they tried to do compressions but she had a—a punctured lung—"

"Kurt," John intoned, his hand a heavy and unexpected comfort on Kurt's shoulder.

He reached up to wipe at his eyes and found them dry. The night it had happened, Kurt had been sleeping over at Blaine's house and they had both awoken to the sound of the static at the end of Blaine's videotape of The Lion King. As Kurt had been scrambling around for the remote to switch off the television, they'd heard voices, and Blaine had convinced him to sneak downstairs and eavesdrop.

Kurt hadn't cried since that night, after the light from the open doorway had spilled out around his dad's crumpling silhouette and the world as he'd known it had ended with only a handful of shattering words. He'd run out to Blaine's backyard in his bare feet and flannel pajamas, screamed himself hoarse at the sky because wasn't his mommy going to be up there, just like Mufasa? Wasn't she going to be up there?

"Why isn't she up there, Blaine?" Kurt had demanded when Blaine had circled around to stand in front of him, and even though Blaine had told Kurt he didn't know and Kurt had hated him for it, Blaine had still caught him as he'd fallen forward, and had held onto him until his dad had come to carry him back into the house.

"I'm so very sorry, Kurt," John repeated, ducking his head to catch Kurt's gaze.

Abruptly, Kurt asked, "What was she like when you knew her?"

John sat back, the corners of his mustache twitching upwards with a smile. "Quiet, bookish. And smart, so very smart. She and your father were inseparable. He didn't even attend college, but whenever I saw her around campus, there they were together. She was always smiling when he was around."

Kurt scratched at the backs of his fingers. "Dad remarried when I was sixteen. She—Carole, she was one of the midwives that night; that's how they met, but I guess they lost touch and didn't see each other again for years."

"And how did you feel about that?" John asked gently.

"I was happy for him. Carole's lovely, and we get along well. She has a son a few months older than me, so that was—different, but... It's been okay. Better than before, I guess."

"But she'll never be your mother, right?"

"Until I saw the road signs, I'd forgotten she even went to school here," Kurt admitted. "How did I forget that?"

John cocked his head to the side. "It's an easy detail to forget, given how young you were when she passed. You remember other things instead, I'm sure."

"I try not to." He blurted it out before he could even think about it, and at the terrible truth of his own words he felt utterly ashamed.

"Because every single time, it makes your breath come a little less easily," John said quietly.

"Hmm?"

"When the sadness comes back. Because it does, it always does, sooner or later. And each time it gets a little harder to stomach."

"Actually—yes, that's exactly what it's like. How..."

"Psychology professor, remember?"

Kurt let out a huff of grim laughter and returned his gaze back to the breeze-rippled surface of the water in the fountain, the wobbling outlines of pennies that had been tossed in there with wishes to ace a final or win the lottery.

"Kurt, if I might ask... How old are you now?"

"Twenty-two."

"Forgive me if I'm crossing a line, here, but... Don't you think that's an awfully long time to be carrying this pain around with you?"

"I don't know what else to do with it," Kurt whispered, wondering exactly why it was so easy to unburden himself to a perfect stranger and so ceaselessly difficult with someone he'd known almost since before he could remember.

"Well, a habit isn't a habit if it's not hard to break," John said succinctly. "But you can break it, if you want to. You can have it in your back pocket without it dictating your life."

"I don't... It's turned me into someone I don't want to be," Kurt confessed, memories of how he'd spent his formative years—passing the time by breaking hearts—rushing to the surface. "But I don't know how to be any other way."

"Do you have a penny?"

Kurt met John's eyes with a quirked eyebrow, and at his impassive expression, decided to humor him. He reached into his pocket and drew out a quarter.

"Good, now stand up and face the water," John instructed him brightly, contradicting his earlier words by almost jumping to his feet, and Kurt wondered if the man had already known or been able to see something in him as he'd happened by. When Kurt was standing, John gestured out to the water. "Make a wish."

"Do I get twenty-five wishes?" Kurt asked jokingly, turning the quarter over and over.

"No. But you do get a chance to do something that I think you probably don't do all that often."

"Which is?"

"Put a little faith in something."

Kurt paused at that, struck by the man's insight. "Am I really that transparent?"

"More of a mirror, actually," John replied mildly, but there was a sadness in his tone that lent weight to his words. "Whenever you're ready."

"What do I wish for?" Kurt asked after a moment, and John shrugged.

"Whatever you want most for yourself."

Kurt looked out at the water, taking in the sprays from the three jets set along the center. He followed the white wall bordering the pool and then let his gaze slide up and away to the benches nestled in the shade of the crepe myrtle trees, their branches hanging heavily under the weight of their pink blossoms. He could almost picture his mother here, the incarnation of her that he'd never known—a dress and shorts, leggings and slouch socks and Keds—handing off a stack of thick psychology textbooks to his father and smiling, smiling, smiling.

I wish to be what he needs me to be, Kurt thought, suddenly flashing on Blaine that night in Philadelphia, splayed out underneath him and waiting for a kiss that Kurt had been unable to give. Blaine needed all of the person he chose to love, and Kurt didn't know how to let someone have all of him when no one had ever had all of him. With the hope that he could learn, he flipped the coin into the water, where it disappeared with a soft plink.

"Now make it come true," John said. He glanced down at his watch and turned to face Kurt squarely. "I'm afraid I have a meeting in ten minutes, so I should be on my way."

Kurt nodded, once more wrapping his arms around himself but feeling that he didn't need to hold himself together quite so tightly. It was an alien sensation, and he didn't quite know how to process it.

"What made you stop and talk to me?" he asked.

John glanced at the fountain, squinting against the sunlight, and said almost cryptically, "Elizabeth wasn't the only person who shared this place with someone she once loved."

"Well... Thank you. For listening," Kurt said sincerely, hoping his sparse words would convey so much more.

"Of course. Take care of yourself, Kurt," John said, before adding, "She'd want you to."

As John walked away, Kurt took a last long look at the fountain and turned back the way he had come. His thoughts fell into quiet reminiscence, and he recalled trips in the car that had felt endless, sitting in the back seat and convincing himself that the car wasn't moving, that it was the buildings and trees that were chasing one another past the windows while Stevie Wonder played quietly in the front, his parents holding hands over the center console. As the trees and buildings moved slowly past him, he let himself wonder if they had been holding hands that night, if they had broken their grasp or held on more tightly when they'd begun to skid.

Crossing the street just past a small, brick-built Catholic chapel, Kurt saw Blaine standing under the shade of a tree at the entrance to the parking lot, his hand raised in a small wave.

Kurt smiled, and waved back.

When he reached the R.V. and pulled himself up through the open side door, soft music was playing and Blaine was dropping tea bags into two white mugs, the kettle switched on and the water bubbling. Kurt leaned against the door frame for a moment, watching and listening to the song's lyrics—"today has been okay, today has been okay."

"How was it?" Blaine asked, glancing over his shoulder.

"Strange, and... Okay," Kurt said, pushing himself upright and walking closer, fingertips trailing along the countertop.

"Sure?"

The kettle boiled, and as Blaine reached for it Kurt impulsively took his outstretched arm and pulled him into a tight hug, pressing his forehead to Blaine's temple. A moment or two passed before Blaine was reaching up to wind his fingers into the hair at the back of Kurt's head, and as he did so, Kurt pressed a fleeting kiss to his cheek.

It wasn't much, or even close to enough, not yet. But it was a start.



Distance: 2,137 miles