Gemotions

The park bench, the place where they’d carved their initials into the ancient oak, now felt alien. Clara, her fingers tracing the faded letters on her own arm—C&D— watched David, her childhood companion, stare back at her with a vacant curiosity. It was as if she'd stepped into an alternate dimension.

He was polite, friendly, but his face was a mask of polite blankness. She tried to prompt him, mentioning the treehouse, the secret clubhouse, the time they got lost in the woods. His response was a polite head tilt, and a polite, “I’m afraid I don't recall any of that.”

A strange, fluttering sensation began in her stomach. Her breath hitched. The familiar scent of pine needles and damp earth seemed foreign, displaced. It was as if their shared history, their intertwined past, had simply evaporated.

Her memories, she suddenly found, felt like a movie that only she could see.