Gemotions

He picked at the loose threads of his worn jacket, his gaze fixed on the bustling city street. The error – a mislabeled blood sample – had given him a false reprieve. His cancer, it turned out, was gone. It had never been his. But the joy he should have felt was absent. Instead, he carried the weight of the other patient’s fear, the other patient’s fight, as if it were his own. He felt exposed, naked, in a city of millions, each face now a judgment. He wanted to scream, to lash out, to somehow fix this injustice, this cruelty of fate. Instead, he just stood there, a solitary figure lost in a sea of faces.