Chapter Text
I am writing these pages in the hope that one day my descendants will read them.
Looking back, I find it strangely ironic that I spent the first twenty-eight years of my life denying God’s existence while devoting myself to ideals I couldn’t see either: love, friendship, loyalty. Perhaps it was that same stubborn disbelief that made me cling so fiercely to them.
And I say my first twenty-eight years because, yes, I, Kurt Hummel, died.
At least, I died once.
You are probably wondering when it happened. The answer is painfully ordinary. A few weeks after my twenty-eighth birthday, I became the victim of a hate crime.
I wish I could tell you that my first life, though brief, was a happy one. It wasn’t. I had been mocked, harassed, and humiliated for my sexual orientation since childhood, and the two people I trusted most eventually shattered what little future I believed I had left.
I have no intention of dwelling on that life or asking for your sympathy by describing the way it ended. The version of me who lived through those years deserves his peace.
What matters is what happened afterward.
When I died, I found myself somewhere between life and whatever comes next. There, for a brief and extraordinary moment, I was reunited with my mother. Through her, God offered me something I never imagined I would receive.
A second chance.
He sent me back to the morning of my fourteenth birthday.
Why would someone who had spent his entire life calling himself an atheist receive such a gift?
I still cannot answer that question without revealing things about Eternity that are not mine to reveal.
What I can say is this: during those few moments with my mother, I learned that believing in kindness, compassion, loyalty, and hope—the things she called the concepts of Light—can matter just as much as believing in God Himself.
After what I experienced, I no longer believed that God required constant praise. If anything, I came to think that we need Him far more than He could ever need us.
So yes, I returned to Earth a believer.
I only wish I could explain why.
One of the greatest regrets of my first life was that I never truly had a family of my own.
For four precious months, I believed I did.
Emotionally, I became the father of a little girl I loved as though she had always been mine. Then, because of the choices made by two deeply broken people, I lost her as suddenly as she had entered my life.
By the time two drunken homophobes finally ended my first life, I was already only half alive. I wandered the streets of New York carrying little more than grief, trying to learn how to survive the betrayal of my husband and the loss of the child I had come to think of as my daughter.
There are parts of that story I will never tell.
Some memories belong to the man who died.
What matters is that I refused to let Rachel Berry and Blaine Anderson define my second life the way they had scarred my first. My mother made certain of that before we said goodbye.
Returning to Earth came with a few conditions.
They all seemed perfectly fair.
Although I would awaken in the body of my fourteen-year-old self, my mind would remain that of the twenty-eight-year-old man I had become. Because of that, I was forbidden from pursuing any romantic or sexual relationship until I reached adulthood again.
In truth, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. Until my eighteenth birthday, my body would simply be free of sexual desire altogether.
I would also keep the memories of my first life, but not the academic knowledge I had accumulated over the years. Nor would I remember sporting results well enough to profit from betting or gain an unfair advantage over anyone else.
Looking back, I cannot think of a single condition that wasn’t reasonable.
So I accepted them without hesitation.
Then I closed my eyes…
…and woke up on the first morning of my second life.