Gemotions

He stared at the overflowing closet, the door barely able to contain the bulging bags. Inside, neatly stacked, were every single essay, every poem, every drawing he'd ever produced in school. His mother, the woman who had always seemed so… normal, had meticulously preserved everything.

A tremor ran through him, starting in his fingertips. He felt an urge to run, to escape the suffocating weight of this discovery. Each page was a fragment of his past, a past that now felt exposed, vulnerable.

"Mom… why?" He managed to choke out the question, his voice barely a whisper. The silence that followed felt vast, filled with unspoken things. He felt an awful tightening in his stomach, as though he was about to be swallowed whole.