#5. Drop Out
Time was another one of those relative things. Subway rides to school in the morning were always too short but coming home in the afternoon, coming home to Kurt, well those had always been too long. While he was living them, his early teen years had seemed to drag on for a hellish eternity but by the time he graduated high school, Kurt at his side and New York and NYADA in front of him, those early years seemed to flash by in the most insignificant types of seconds. No matter how he looked at that year though, it seemed to go too fast. He was there and happy and thriving and then in one conversation, that all changed and suddenly he wasn't. He fell and it all happened so fast that there was no time to reach out for something to grab and hold onto.
He had never fallen that fast before. When high school had been bad he'd still been able to hold onto his spot on the honor role. He'd never failed a test, let alone flunk out completely. High school was easier granted and maybe if he'd been in third year and well past the freshman learning curve, he would have been able to pull through. He didn't know if the fact was comforting or just an added depressant. He hated that someone, even Kurt, could derail his life so violently. Because it wasn't just his relationship status that Kurt obliterated in one night, with one word, it was his education and future career too. But it wasn't Kurt really. It was him. He had allowed himself to become so attached, so achingly in love that his entire world crumbled when that person decided that he no longer felt the same. If there was even a chance to think that maybe a year or two down the line he wouldn't've been so obliterated, he could pretend that his entire sense of self wasn't wrapped around Kurt tighter than his jeans. Pretend was the key word though and nothing good ever came from what if games.
Sunday mornings spent in bed pouring over what if he had said this or done this instead of rehearsing monologues quickly became Monday mornings in bed thinking about what the wedding could've been and what stage of planning they would have been at instead of in class. Afternoons in the library became afternoons in his room, curtains drawn, books forgotten still hidden away in his book bag. He would sometimes just stare at the untouched pillow that lay beside his on the bed. Because slipping grades and academic probation didn't matter anymore, all Blaine cared about was Kurt and that he no longer mattered to him.
Blaine had never admitted defeat before. Dalton was forced upon him by his parents and the prep school was more of a stepping stone than anything back then. A plane ride back to a fly over state was not.
Therapy had been okay at first. It had given him a reason to get out of the house. He even pulled out his old bow tie rotation schedule. And talking helped. Blaine still wasn't convinced that she truly got it though. Most people didn't, that he could be so young and so completely heart broken. Everyone talked as if with time he could move on. Time was relative though and without Kurt, his world slowed to halt. No matter how many days or months passed, his head still seemed as jumbled and as frantic as the night it happened. Time just no longer ticked for him as it did for the rest of the world around him, leaving him stranded within his own head.
Now though, now Blaine knew his therapist's degree had truly been a waste of a university education. She had taken advantage of his weakened state and convinced him to take up a volunteer coaching job for the Warblers.
He felt sick as he drove the twenty five minutes from his parent's house to Dalton. That drive used to feel like an eternity after breaks that he was forced to spend at home and away from his friends and his dorm. He didn't have friends there anymore though. The ones that had bothered to apologize for the slushy incident had all graduated and moved onto to Ivy League schools. They were becoming doctors, lawyers, politicians, investment bankers. The kids who were left had all of them to look up to and would laugh in his face when they saw that he had come crawling back.
And as they laughed, Blaine would be forced to walk the halls he used to walk with Kurt, hand in hand, sit on the couch in the lounge where he used to lean slowly ever closer and closer to Kurt when they did their homework. He'd have to pass the staircase with no one to stop him and ask for directions, no one to look back at him with awe and wonder as he proclaimed his love.
It would feel so empty, a shell of its former self, haunted by happy ghosts, faded by time and greyed by the knowledge that they would never be alive again.
Why would anyone want to go back to that?