Work Text:
While Kevin’s mind was made of boxes, they were most certainly not small, in fact, they varied greatly in size.
Some of them were quite large actually, taking up more space than they probably should.
The box labeled MORMONISM used to be one of those.
It wasn’t anymore.
Gradually, it had shrunk; it was still present, still more sizeable than many of the other boxes, but some of the things usually packed inside it had been removed and put in other boxes more fitting. “Faith”, for example, was no longer housed in the religious box, instead now neatly nestled in the box labeled FRIENDS , one of the boxes that had grown visibly in the last couple of weeks.
And sure, yeah, the box labelled EGO hadn’t changed in size whatsoever, and sure, a large part of its contents was still “Make me look good”, but that hadn’t stopped “Make others feel good” from slowly taking a place in there as well.
The ORLANDO box hadn’t changed in size either, but the label had started to change. It had taken a lot, a lot , of time for Kevin to understand that his ORLANDO box wasn’t actually just a thing he had loved so much that it had ended up receiving it’s own box in his mind, but rather, that it was a box that had always been there, simply relabeled.
His ORLANDO box was his HAPPINESS box; always had been. Kevin had never been able to fully grasp the concept of happiness and maybe, now that he thought about it, he had never truly felt it.
Not before his trip to Orlando at least.
Because Orlando had just been amazing, and crazy, and amazing, and he had wanted to stay for there for the rest of his life, and it was something physical ge could look at, and touch, and be in, and then Orlando became happiness and happiness became Orlando. Happiness became a place rather than a feeling.
And that was why the label was starting to change because, ever so slowly, Kevin was starting to understand that he didn’t have to be in Orlando to be happy. He was starting to understand he could be happy anywhere.
So many other boxes were scattered across his mind, some seemingly broken, somehow destroyed; crushed beneath an invisible weight. Others were perfectly intact. Some were opened, others were closed, some had a crack in them.
He recognized all of them.
However, there was one box he had never really paid much attention to. It was a rather small one, stashed behind all the other boxes. A thin, unbroken layer of dust covered it; untouched and unopened. It wasn’t because he ignored it, or because he hated it, or anything like that. It was because of disinterest really, a lack of time in real life. Maybe a lack of space in his mind more than anything.
This was the box Kevin stood before, at least in his head, reading the one word, the eight letters written across the side of it: STRAIGHT.
He had never had a problem with this word, had never found himself questioning it or what it meant.
Now, however, as he scrutinized it more thoroughly, he noticed how wrong it looked; the letters were large and crude, a bit crooked as if they had been hastily plastered onto the box without care or second thoughts. But the worst thing, Kevin realised, was that it most definitely wasn’t his doing.
He had not written this.
Someone else had.
He reached forward, carefully picking up the box, holding it between his hands, not too sure how fragile it was; scared that it would break if he held it too hard. It was sort of heavy, not very, but enough to make it difficult for him to hold it in one hand.
Suddenly, something caught his attention; a small smudge peeked out behind the H.
Kevin’s eyes widened in the slightest as he warily started picking at it with his forefinger only to find that it was not a smudge. No, it was definitely not a smudge. It was printed onto the box and could not be removed. He furrowed his brows, continuing to scrape his nail along the spot.
A small part of the H came off.
The only smudge on that box was the word he had not written.
And so, ever so slowly, with trembling fingertips, he tried to remove and erase the writing that did not belong to him, the label someone else had given him.
As he did this, he thought about the girls back in elementary school with their pretty hair and nice laughter; he thought about Mark with the soft hands; he thought about high-school where he didn’t think about those things; he thought about Lisa with the green eyes; he thought about Connor and his kind voice and lightly read hair; he thought about his love for Arnold and Nabulungi; he thought about how he had trouble truly distinguishing what emotions rant through him as he did this.
He thought about himself.
For once it wasn’t a bad thing. For once it felt appropriate.
Finally, the crude letters were gone and he was left with another set of letters.
They matched his handwriting.
This was his word, his choice.
He liked it.
It fit.
It fit him.
It wasn’t something he had really considered before, but now that he saw it in front of him, had discovered it by himself.
This was him.
Right now, the box was small, fragile even, and it would probably continue to be that way for a while. However, as with the rest of the boxes, it could grow if he wanted it to. He didn’t have to open it either, didn’t have to truly explore and find out what this word on the box entailed.
Perhaps one day he would do it. Perhaps with someone, perhaps without.
Right now, he was just happy to have it, this box, no longer covered by something someone else had written.
This was him.
Kevin liked “him”.