Gemotions

"Oh, for crying out loud," Sarah muttered, the words escaping her before she could stop them. Her mother's attic, a monument to sentimentality, was overwhelming. She ran a hand through her hair, already feeling the oppressive weight of the space.

The first assignment, a construction paper turkey, was a blast from a distant, unwelcome past. She glanced at the crooked features of the bird, the glue smudges, and the handwriting, that she remembered her mother correcting constantly. A flush rose in her cheeks.

She was surprised she hadn’t walked out already. The relentless archiving of every school project—a history report on the Civil War, a diorama of the solar system, a hand-drawn map of the United States—felt incredibly invasive, a relentless catalog of someone she'd rather not revisit. The sheer extent of it was… exhausting.