Short Stories (BxB)

Feelings - Luke & Parker

Prompt: In a world where people aren't supposed to have emotion, you make me feel different... and I don't like it.

Around 7000 words

Luke's Point of View

As I walked past the living room after I got home from school, I heard my father say to my mother, "More ridiculous news articles are popping up about people claiming to feel emotions. When will these people realize that it's just a myth?"

I glanced over and they were both sitting on the couch. My father was on his phone, looking at news articles, and my mother was reading her book.

She looked up and shook her head, "I don't know, Sean. Some people just need attention."

"Hello," I greeted, "I'm home."

"Hello, Lucas. Do you have homework?" My mother asked.

I nodded, "I'm going to go do it now."

They both nodded at me and then went back to what they were doing.

I walked upstairs to my room and immediately sighed after I closed my door behind me.

It made me feel weird when people talked about that in front of me. Emotions.

I was confused enough as it was, without hearing people everywhere saying that it wasn't actually a thing.

How did they know? Just because they didn't feel it, it wasn't real? What about air? People couldn't see that but they knew and believed it was there. What if that was actually a myth?

I sighed again and sat at my desk, opening my laptop.

I pulled up my web browser, and I only had to type a few letters before it knew what I wanted. I had only searched it a million times.

What are emotions?

There weren't many results, but the few websites that did pop up were filled with information.

I read through a few of the basic emotions again.

Happiness ~ hap-pi-ness ~ the state of being happy

Happy ~ hap-py ~ feeling or showing pleasure or contentment

Sadness ~ sad-ness ~ the condition or quality of being sad

Sad ~ sad ~ feeling or showing sorrow; unhappy

Anger ~ an-ger ~ a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility

Displeasure ~ dis-pleas-ure ~ a feeling of disapproval

Fear ~ fear ~ an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat

The list was a lot longer though. There were at least one hundred emotions.

Every time I read through those websites; my head throbbed. I just couldn't understand... there were so many emotions, why couldn't we feel any of them? What was the point of them being out there – with names and definitions and descriptions?

Some people did feel them – or at least some claimed to. My father claimed they were all lying, as did most people. People at my school talked about it a lot, they always said that people who claimed they could feel emotions were idiots and attention seekers. Of course, I never got into those conversations. I never knew what I really thought about the topic. Until I realized that every time people talked about it in front of me, I started to... feel strange. I didn't know why. So I tried to avoid it.