Gemotions

The cafe was warm, the smell of coffee a familiar comfort. But Amelia couldn’t taste it. The words of the biography were a persistent hum in her mind, a discordant note to the otherwise pleasant ambience. She tapped a fingernail against the porcelain, the rhythmic sound a futile attempt to distract herself.

She’d found the book by accident, on a sale table at a used bookstore. The title, her name, jumped out at her. The author, a woman she’d never met, had somehow chronicled her life, from childhood scrapes to professional triumphs, with an unsettling accuracy. It was all there, laid bare.

She felt a hollowness, an echoing void where her emotions used to reside. She kept replaying scenes in her head, the moments the writer chose to highlight, questioning if she had truly experienced them as she remembered. She picked up the cup, took a sip of the still-warm liquid, and set it down, the taste of the coffee like ashes in her mouth.