Kurt didn’t know how he managed to get through the rest of the day. After remaining unmoving on the sidewalk for at least five minutes, the rational and practical part of him kicked in and he made his way back to campus in a daze. He arrived late for his lecture, earning himself a dirty look from the lecturer and several other students who were annoyed at having their precious lecture interrupted. He apologized flatly and found an empty seat. He stared blankly ahead at the screen, reading the tinny words on the powerpoint and not understanding anything. There seemed to be a sort of buzzing in his brain. He wondered vaguely if this was what being dyslexic felt like. Reading words and having them not make any sense. When the lecture ended two hours later, he left with no idea what it had been about.

                He met Sierra, and waited in silence as she laid into him, starting with angry hissing about how I was so embarrassed, he kept looking at me and raising his eyebrows and asking where my partner was – she emphasized the word “partner” as if it were some sort of dirty word – and ended up screeching that if you don’t want to commit to this project, fine, please find another partner, I can complete it myself. He replied her hollowly on autopilot when she had finished, expressing his sorrow at his irresponsibility and could she please give him another chance?, he would make sure he pulled his weight for the project in the future. She looked dissatisfied at the lack of emotion in his apology – and perhaps he hadn’t looked contrite enough? –, but sniffed and accepted it grudgingly before spinning around and stalking away haughtily. Kurt noted apathetically that he would have much work to do to get Sierra to behave amicably towards him again, or their project would turn out in disaster.

                He attended his history of fashion lecture, which was usually his favourite, but today for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. Did he really need to know about the reason for the popularity of tea gowns in the 1970s? What good would that do? He stared at photos and photos and photos of women dressed in ridiculously frilly gowns with huge poufy trains that dragged on the ground and suppressed the urge to stand up and tell the lecturer that all those dresses were hideous, the women who wore them must have been out of their minds. When the class ended, he was the first to leave; he didn’t need to pack up, he hadn’t taken any notes.

                His phone buzzed and he looked at it numbly. It was an alert. Dinner with Andrew he read. Who the hell was Andrew? He gazed at the screen blankly for a few long beats, his mind coming up with nothing. Why would he be having dinner with this Andrew dude? He racked his brain but came up with nothing. Without pause, he slid his thumb across the screen to unlock the phone, and typed out a quick message: Hi Andrew. I’m sorry, but I can’t make it for our dinner today, something cropped up. I apologize for the late notice. –Kurt. He reread the text briefly, all the while wondering since when had he talked like that? When he scrolled through his contacts, he was vaguely pleased to find an Andrew Hunter. He sent the text, and slid his phone back into his pocket. There. Done. Stranger Andrew had been dealt with. He would try to figure out who he was later, when he could think more clearly.

                Kurt made his way home. The sky was slowly changing colour, turning from blue to a dazzling hue of pink red orange, an unusual sight in New York City, he noted, and waited for the artistic side in him to react to the remarkable beauty of the dusk, but felt nothing. When he entered his apartment, it was dark. He turned on the lights and sat himself down at the dining table. Rachel wasn’t back yet, and he wasn’t in any mood for cooking today, which meant take-out for dinner. He hoped she hadn’t gone out again. He knew that he should probably order something, so that when Rachel came back there would be food ready, but he couldn’t seem to recall where the take-out menus were kept.

                After a while, he dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small scrap of paper. His hands shook as he flattened it out with his fingers. The number on the taxi’s license plate was scribbled messily on it, the ink smudged. He had memorized it as he stared at the disappearing back of the taxi. He clumsily pressed the number of the taxi company into the keypad of his phone, taking three tries before he managed to enter the number correctly; his fingers seemed cold and twitchy today. He held his breath as chirpy muzak filled his ears.

                “If you would like to call a cab to your destination, please press 1. If you would like to…” It went on. Kurt drummed the fingers of his free hand nervously on the table top.

                “If you would like to reach our customer service counter, please press 5.” He keyed in five very deliberately, making sure that his fingers were steady. The ringing started, and he felt his throat go dry.

                “Good evening, this is Suzanne speaking. How may I assist you today?” Her voice was dull and flat, as if she had been doing this all day, was bored out of her mind and couldn’t wait to get home. He didn’t blame her. She sounded young; perhaps she had a boyfriend or maybe girlfriend waiting for her at home to welcome her with a peck on the lips and a whispered “I love you”. Maybe there would be a homemade dinner ready at the table, where they would laugh and giggle as they shared stories of their respective days at work. Maybe they would fall asleep in front of the TV, arms around each other, dreaming of their future together.

                He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

                “Hello? Is anyone on the line?” He could hear Suzanne’s barely contained annoyance. He tried to say something again but the back of his throat felt blocked up.

                “Fuck you,” she muttered, and sighed heavily, as if she were making to put down the phone.

                “Stop!” he cried, and he could hear her little “oh” of surprise.

                “I’m sorry, ma’am, how can I help you?” Her embarrassment was evident in her overtly polite tone. She was probably praying he didn’t complain about her swearing to her boss or something, and he wondered whether there were really people with so little else to do in their lives that they would bother to do such a thing. He didn’t bother to correct her “ma’am”, he was used to it.

                “Um, I would like to, um, enquire about a taxi that I saw earlier today?”

                “What? Oh. Huh? Right, okay. What about?”

                “I was, um, someone I knew got into this taxi, at about lunchtime, and I wasn’t fast enough to stop the cab, and it drove away… So I was wondering if I could find out where this taxi dropped off the passenger.”

                There was silence from the other line, apart from a faint crackling.

                He could hear Suzanne take a very audible deep breath. “Ma’am, I’m afraid we can’t divulge such information about our passengers. And anyway to begin with, we don’t even have the taxi license plate number—”

                “I have it,” he interrupted.

                She continued without missing a beat, sounding a lot more professional than she did when the conversation had first started. “—and even if we did, we don’t have records of the passengers we pick up. And coming back to my first point, we can’t just give you information like that. We value the privacy of our passengers.” The last line sounded as if it had come out of the press pack.

                “But I know this guy,” he told her desperately, his hand curling more tightly around the phone, “he’s my friend.”

                “I’m very sorry, I can’t—”

                “Please! At least give me the contact of the driver.”

                “No!” she almost yelled into the receiver. There was a beat, and she continued, in a more controlled tone, though he could identify the irritation seeping through her words, “I’m very sorry ma’am, but as I said before, we are not allowed to reveal this sort of information, and even if we put you in touch with the driver, I highly doubt he would be able to remember—”

                “At least let me try! I’m sure he would be able to remember my friend, he’s—” His voice caught and he snapped his mouth shut.

                He couldn’t bring himself to say it, the word blind, because if he did, it would make everything real and he would have to acknowledge for the first time today that it was true, Blaine was blind, Blaine was blind Blaine was blind Blaine was blind, and the final thought of that almost brought him to tears. With a roar, all the thoughts he had locked out of his head since their meeting this afternoon were rushing into his head.

                Was Blaine even Blaine now? Why couldn’t he remember Kurt, not at all? Had someone kidnapped Blaine and tortured him and somehow simultaneously erased all his memories of Kurt? Was it some sort of elaborate act? But deep down Kurt knew it wasn’t. Did he have no memory of Kurt at all? What about all that time spent together, talking about inconsequential things, talking about their future, just talking? How about the afternoons spent side by side in the mall, in their homes, sitting always so close in the choir room? And what about all their hand-holds, their kisses, their nights spent pressed up against each other, the warmth of Blaine’s breath on his neck? Were they all gone?

                Was Blaine permanently blind? Totally blind? Could he not see even just a little bit? He remembered how much Blaine had loved the brilliant hues of the sunset. Could he still admire the colours of the sky anymore? Was all of that gone, stolen away from him by some cruel force?

                And the worst of all, why had he let him slip away again?

                “Hello? Ma’am? Hello, are you still there?” The girl on the line was talking.

                “Yeah. Yeah, I’m still here,” and he realized that he was crying, tears running freely down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

                “Look,” the girl said. Because she wasn’t Suzanne, Suzanne was a vibrant girl with hopes and dreams and loves, and he didn’t know anything about any of that. He only knew her voice, and maybe her age, and that wasn’t enough at all to say he really knew her, was it? Just like how it seemed all Blaine knew of Kurt was his voice, and also maybe his age, and that really wasn’t anything, just a few silly little details that Blaine had surely already forgotten, erased from his mind as he went on his brand new Kurt-less life.

                He was sobbing now, loudly, gasping for breath, and he felt so embarrassed, because the poor girl on the other end of the line.

                “Oh god,” he heard her say. “Oh, god. Look, ma’am, I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid we can’t assist you in any way.” She spoke more kindly now, “I’m sorry, and I hope you manage to find your friend.” There was a pause, then the beep of the line being hung up. He kept the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the beeping that signified emptiness on the other end.

                “He’s not my friend,” he said tremulously. “I loved him. He was the first boy I ever really loved, and he loved me back, and we were so good together. So, so good.

                “He loved me and I loved him and that was all that mattered. Because it didn’t matter that we were both boys, that the word gay was taboo in Lima, what was important was that our love could never be broken.

                “Even when I graduated and he didn’t, even when I left for New York and he remained in crappy Ohio, we stayed strong. We texted, we called, we Skyped each other every day. We managed it, the long distance relationship thing. And I continued loving him, and I’m sure he continued loving me too.”

                His voice was coming in ragged bouts now, his breathing harsh and noisy through the tears. He brought his hand down slowly to rest on the table, staring at the screen. Call ended, the screen flashed.

                “But when I came back home after my first year of college, he was gone. Leaving nothing but a letter. His family was gone, their house sold. I searched, I searched for so goddamn long, and I still couldn’t find him. I looked for him so hard — even when my dad and all my friends told me to give up, I still looked. And I still couldn’t find him.”

                Then his words were almost incoherent, tumbling over one another as he spoke, choking on his tears and gasping them out in between breaths.

                “I miss him so much. I know I seem fine on the outside, but I’m not. I’m dying every day. I miss the way he says my name, as if it’s the most important, valued word in the world. I miss the way he always knew what to say to cheer me up. I miss the way his hands felt around mine. I miss the way his lips felt on mine.” Here his voice broke, and he let the phone slip from his grasp to drop with a gentle clatter onto the tabletop.

                “And I found him. I found him but he didn’t remember me, not at all, he had forgotten everything we had. And now I’ve lost him again, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get him back.”

                Kurt stopped then to catch his breath, gasping, uncaring of the salty wetness running ceaselessly down his cheeks.

                “I miss you, Blaine,” he whispered brokenly into the quiet of the empty apartment. He pretended that Blaine was standing across the table from him, looking the same way he had looked the last time Kurt saw him, young and beautiful and whole. His imaginary Blaine smiled gently, and reached to clasp Kurt’s hand. He imagined he could feel the warmth on the back of his hand, the slow rubbing of Blaine’s thumb across his knuckles. It almost felt real.

                “I miss you so much,” Kurt whispered to him hoarsely, “I need you.”

                The figure faded away, and he was cold and alone.

                “I need you.”

                He rested his head down on the table, barely registering how the cold table top pressed into his cheek uncomfortably, and cried and cried and cried.