Gemotions

He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, the lines around his eyes etched deeper than usual. The book claimed a grand romance, a passionate affair that had defined his youth. The truth was far more mundane, more solitary. The biography’s lies were like a constant static, buzzing in his ears. He scrubbed at his face, trying to erase the phantom touch of a lover he never had, the ghost of a past that never existed. Each day was a struggle, a fight to reclaim his own narrative from the fiction that had usurped it.