When Kurt first entered his boyfriend's bedroom, he was taken aback by how little it resembled anything he thought Blaine Anderson was.
Football jerseys and basketball posters lined maroon walls. A plaid, flannel bedspread covered a plain twin bed. And on the barren, oak night stand was a copy of the Holy Bible and the Boy Scout Handbook.
"Is this… is this a joke?" Kurt had asked.
Blaine was a little disconcerted, but he understood. Sometimes, he asked himself why it was that he was content to live in a shell that failed to represent any aspect of his personality. And it always happened that he had no answer to that question. It was simply a reality of his life –his life as a singer, a performer, a homosexual.
"No. No, this is my room."
Kurt circled about the room slowly, and Blaine watched the boy from afar. "I've never redecorated. I've just been… adding and adding as time goes on,"
Months passed by, and slowly between the two boys grew that sort of bond –that emphatic synergy- that allowed Kurt to understand.
Blaine's room captured everything he had ever failed to be.
All of the expectations, all of the dreams his parents and family had doled out to him were trapped, imprisoned in this room.
Blaine would never have cared to be a star athlete or Webelo. His bible went untouched. The Playboy magazines given to him by an older cousin lay dismissed and unwanted under his bed.
Kurt saw now that Blaine –dauntless and frank in his public life- had bottled up all of his fears and betrayals not in himself, but into his room.
One day, Kurt rifled through a drawer of Blaine's and found a seemingly empty picture frame. Upon further inspection, Kurt found that the picture inside had merely been turned over. Checking to see that his boyfriend was still away fetching snacks for the two before beginning the Lord of the Rings marathon they had planned, Kurt removed the worn picture and flipped it over.
Inside was a photograph of a young Blaine, dressed in khaki and a floppy fisherman's hat, holding up a plump rainbow trout. Beside him was a far younger version of Mr. Anderson, beaming in exultation towards the camera as he gestured at the fish. The expression on Blaine's face was nothing like his father's. In Blaine's eyes were the beginnings of tears, and he held the fish as far from himself as at all possible. Revulsion was clear in his posture, as if the dead fish was diseased or radioactive.
Kurt smiled a bittersweet smile. Even then, at the age of 5 or 6, Blaine –sweet, compassionate Blaine- knew himself and his values. Kurt wondered then, "How young are we when we recognize, even unconsciously, just who we are?"
Kurt's father said he had known that his son was gay since his son was 3. Kurt himself had made the epiphany somewhere between the ages of 9 and 13. And Blaine had said that it wasn't until he had first danced with a girl that he had known for sure.
But perhaps, as evident in Blaine's fermented corpse of a bedroom, people knew themselves inside and out far earlier than they believed. Perhaps, from the very start, people knew just who they were and what they were going to be.
And perhaps people were not actually defined by their failures or made stronger by the things that harmed them. Those failures and disappointments would always travel with them, but had no bearing on their personality, their soul. They were shells of the past, ghosts of yesteryear. They were snowglobes, trapping inside each slight, each deficiency, and each broken heart.