Gemotions

The silence in the old house was oppressive. I spent the afternoon going through the contents of my grandfather's things. His stories were always colorful, larger than life. The hero of every tale. But in one of his old photo albums, there was a picture. It showed him, as a young man, arms around someone who wasn't my grandmother.

My throat constricted. My hands started to shake. The world felt like it was crumbling around me, my whole sense of the past dissolving into nothing. The air inside the room was suddenly so hard to breathe. The story of my family seemed a fiction, the foundation of my life nothing but lies.

I felt like an empty shell, a vessel without a soul, adrift in a sea of confusion and disbelief. The world around me lost its color, and I was just left.