Gemotions

“Another one?” Sarah’s voice was sharp, a little too loud, when she answered the phone. The DNA results had been the final straw. She'd already been feeling…unsettled for months. Now, the revelation of her adoption felt like a confirmation of a long-held suspicion.

She paced in the small, sterile confines of her apartment, phone pressed to her ear. The conversation with her adoptive mother, who had been loving and kind, felt brittle, artificial. She spoke in clipped sentences, her answers evasive. She slammed the phone down. The screen saver, a picturesque landscape of mountains and sky, filled her with a sense of suffocating claustrophobia. She ripped a poster off the wall, her movements abrupt and violent, a desperate attempt to break free from the constraints of her new, uncertain reality.