the ink drips from a dancer's pen

I have a chest of drawers. It is taller, taller than I am and I need to stoop to hug my grandmother on Christmas. Each drawer is inlaid with ornate designs and whorls but each design is unique, each curve and inlay completely different than the others. The top few drawers are just simple things, socks, shirts, underwear color-coded for the days of the week(monday is blood-red). However, the further you go down, the less purpose each drawer seems to have. The middle drawer is filled with polka-dotted cloth and has a paper nurse's cap, with a big red cross in the middle of it's brow. It smells overwhelmingly of crushed almonds with a slight under-note of expensive perfume. The next drawer, if you were to explore it, is somehow suffused with a pale yellow light that streams out of it and fills the room with a feeling of warmth and, somehow, a slight breeze. The only other thing in this drawer is a small, dead bird.

Now, if you were to leave here, I'd understand. This chest of drawers is only for me and, as you look for something to wear for work, I imagine you realize this search might be somewhat fruitless, but, something must've gotten the better of you and there are only three more drawers and you got some time. So, you tenatively open the next drawer, but, here is dissapointment. As in the drawer is filled with nothing, but, it is a tangiable nothing. It feels like nothing that was created, that was shaped. It feels more like the drawer was scrubbed clean rather than left empty and, in fact, you see some blood streaks on the wood grain and, in places, the varnish came up, exposing the unpolished wood underneath. This drawer makes you the most uncomfortable and you slam it close. You decide to skip all the way to the bottom, which is good, because all the next drawer holds is a bottle of pills and something terrifying, something that was once alive but was killed, destroyed.

So, in a trance, you open that last drawer and it smells like the northeastern sea. You pull a beautiful sundress out of it, patterened with chevrons and made of crepe. You picture yourself on a tall beach, the wind whipping against your dress, the thin material crushing against your body. Work calls. You turn hesitantly away from the drawer and answer the phone. You're not needed today, it turns out, and so you put the phone down and reach for the dress and pull it over your naked form, feeling how well it fits and, as you pull open the blinds, the sunlight bursts down upon you and already you start to feel yourself sweat.