Gemotions

The house echoed with silence. Amelia felt it in her bones, a cold ache that settled in her stomach. She drifted through the rooms, a ghost in her own life, avoiding the places that held too many memories.

Then she found the attic. The air was stale, the sunlight weak. In a corner, a box, marked in her mother’s careful script: “Amelia’s Treasures.” Inside, meticulously organized, were years and years of her schoolwork. She picked up a poetry assignment, the words she’d written as a teenager suddenly feeling distant and irrelevant.

She stared at the pristine pages, the evidence of a life she could barely remember. She felt the tears well in her eyes. It was a physical thing, the grief, a pressure in her chest.