I’m not able to face the truth, He thinks, he knows. The doors part to welcome Kurt inside, but there’s no welcoming here. As he followed the gray speckled floor, Kurt remembers the first time he’d seen it, the brown shoes Mr. Shue wore 4 out of the 5 days that Kurt saw him each week shuffling in front of him. He listened to the ding of the elevator.

Kurt stepped inside the distressingly white space and stared at the shoes all around his own as the elevator ascended. Other people crowded around him, and he couldn’t help but notice that they were all so composed.

There was a man in a vague black suit, with brown lazy hair. A woman with blonde curly locks and a pink low cut t-shirt that made him feel disgusting for her. A man wearing a blue sweatshirt and a surplus of hair gel. If he’d been anywhere else he may have even laughed. It was between fleeting glances that Kurt realized they all had one thing in common. Every one of them wore a smile. Do they know where they are? Who are they coming to see? Probably someone who just had a baby. It seemed impossible that anything cheerful could occur in a place like this.

He couldn’t look up, even after they exited, but Kurt could feel the woman at the front desk smiling at him. He said the name and it sounded distant. It sounded as if he were talking about someone he had never met, someone who didn't even exist in his mind's eye yet. It sounded so strange on Kurt’s tongue after that day. It was like saying a word so often that it doesn’t feel like a word anymore, fuzzy and wrong on Kurt’s lips.

“Room 173, visiting hours begin in 15 minutes approximately” the woman behind the desk said cheerfully, as if her vehement optimism would actually lift Kurt’s spirits today. He whispered his insincere thanks incoherently to someone who didn’t matter, and followed his the tiles to a secluded cluster of chairs. He sat himself in one of the wooden-armed seats with that ugly periwinkle cloth pattern on the cushions, tan geometric shapes adorning the fabric. He crossed both his arms and legs.

Kurt sat there twenty minutes and it felt like 3 days. The time passed, and he felt himself stand. The tiles changed and Kurt watched their patterns, distorted in his troubled mind as he continued after a nurse down the hall. It wasn’t real until he came here. I am facing it in the most direct form possible. I’m not ready, but here I am.

They pass by an operating room and it sends a chill through him. Kurt’s mind felt flooded, like all the blood had rushed to it, just swimming around up there. The clean white walls around seemed to engulf him and mirror Kurt’s feeling of nothingness.

Beeps echoed all around him, drilling into his brain within minutes, swirling around, distorting and pulsing inside his skull. They seemed ingrained in his thoughts permanently as Kurt felt his stomach churn.
162. 163. 164. He walks slower now, knowing that every step brings him closer. Kurt’s head pounds and aches with the kind of hurt that no medication can restrain. He feels sick to his stomach and Kurt’s whole body begins tying itself in black knots. I’m ready to break. His legs are shaking and trembling. He grows heavier, stiffer, tenser, sicker. His legs feel intensely sore. The hallway has done to him what running 14 miles could do easily.

He was afraid, but the ignorance hurt most. Closer and closer to the end of the hall. 172. 173.

Kurt walks into the room, finally lifting his head, more uncomfortable than he had ever been before in his sixteen short years of drawing breath. His eyes sting to hold back tears when they meet the broken man with the needles in her arms.

This was the first time in months he’d been back in this hospital. What surprised him most was not how utterly deteriorated his father had become, but the boy standing over him.

“Peter?”