Gemotions

The email arrived as she was staring out the window, watching the rain. The request was from David Chen. She’d spent the last hour staring at the downpour, a perfect visual metaphor for the internal landscape of her heart.

She thought of the scraped knees, the whispered cruelties, the feeling of being the weakest link in a chain of bullies. She felt it again, the old tightness in her chest, but it was muted now, like a distant echo.

She could block him, delete the request, pretend it never happened. But the energy required to make that decision felt monumental. With a heavy sigh, she clicked "Accept," the action accompanied by a feeling of inevitability, a shrug of the shoulders in the face of the universe.