[ OT ] Sunday Free Write : Leave A Story , Leave A Comment - Another Call for Moderators Edition

Just a little [ PI ] from during the week. 
 
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 These little cupboards were not uncommon, especially if you know where to look and who to expect to have one. With their all-too-well-oiled hinges, polished brass handles and patches of rich veneer worn thin by touch upon countless touch. 
 
 Whitney had suspected, since her late teens when had begun to amass her own, that her mother may have one hidden away somewhere, but she had simply never looked for it. The assorted glass bottles of all manner of shapes and sizes, filled with liquids fluorescing silently in the shadows within did not surprise her in the slightest. They were so similar and always had been, why shouldn ’ t they have found solace in the same coping mechanism? 
 
 Her own cupboard, by comparison, was as different as it was the same. Hers no more recent in its antique stylings but clearly far less extensively used. Less worn and much smaller, the only aspect that surprised Whitney about the other was the sheer size of it, more accurately; the depth. 
 
 After so many years bottling emotions a collector begins to acquire the eye, amassing, not unlike the artist, an extensive palette, a repertoire of feelings all identifiable by their unique and spectral glow. The most obvious colours, those so strong they crept into the common vernacular of the otherwise ignorant, were readily picked up. 
 
 Blues for sadness in a million hues, reds are deep glowing rage within their receptacles and greens give colour to the gamut of human greed and envy. Brighter colours tending to suggest a pure emotion whereas deeper shades betray those which grew from darker seeds. The real difficulty in identification arises with feelings that are hard to pin, impossible to quantify, even as they are felt; attempt, for instance, to paint ennui or give colour to love itself. 
 
 She allowed her mind to wander as lightly over the contents of each bottle just as her fingers brushed their necks in turn. Occasionally a tone would match that from her memory precisely and Whitney knew instantly what the liquid contained. Others were merely familiar and small flavours, guesses, were all she would allow herself. None of this was hers, after all. 
 
 The guilt of her intrusion soon became too persistent, the realisation she had already gone further than she should. As she closed the first door an other-worldly illumination caught her keenly attuned eye. It was beautiful. A beauty owed in part to its uncommon eerie quality of light but to a much greater degree its ghostly pale violet-blue hue. 
 
 Never for moment had she ever seriously considered actually tasting another ’ s memories, especially those of her mother, the dangers to obvious to even require consideration, but this colour, it called to her. It called and she answered. 
 
 The rim of the neck was cool against her lower lip. It ’ s contents nothing short of icy. As it slipped down her throat she could mark it ’ s progress just as the grey crept in at the edges of vision. Soon the room in which she had been standing had faded, the rough texture of flagstones beneath her bare feet replaced with cold, dark grass. Whitney knew this before she could see anything and standing in the inky blackness it comforted her. 
 
 One by one the stars began to blink into life. A yellow crescent moon waxed into view over the now visible tree-line, the black tips of a artists bristles having just drawn down the last star peppered stroke of the deep blue sky. She could feel the drying tracks of tears on her cheeks and knew almost instinctively the memory in which she had found herself. 
 
 Whitney had a similar memory of her own, far more painful, more formative, but both grew from the same root. The death of her grandmother, her mother ’ s mother2. She was old and so very ill; her throat had slowly collapsed on itself requiring a tracheotomy. First it robbed her of her voice and went on to take her life in a crimson-faced fit of choking seizures. 
 
 Her own memory began with a silent call to her house phone, her mother had checked the caller ID, answered, listened for no more than a second or two and immediately began to panic. She shouted at Whitney to find her shoes and, seemingly without time to leave the house, they were in the car and heading to her grandmother ’ s. Nothing, no prior experience, could have prepared her for what came next. 
 
 Her grandmother ’ s face was an instantly unsettling puce. Her eyes seemed to have shrunk into her head behind a veil of tears and panic. A deep guttural bubbling issued forth from the plastic tube beneath the loose flesh of her chin. Her mother began to cry, to push at the old woman ’ s chest, to try and pull her from the reclining chair in which she slumped. Whitney had been commanded, screamed at, to phone the ambulance and found herself helpless but to stand and dryly recite information the dispatcher requested. 
 
 She had been fifteen years old and the memory had formed her very outlook on life. She had always assumed her mother would remember that awful day in a similar manner, for all Whitney knew she did, but this was not quite the memory in question. This recollection was a melancholic one, of that there was no doubt, but the overbearing feeling was one of comfort. 
 
 As confusing as this juxtaposition felt to her, all Whitney had to do to understand was look to the sky. It was a sharp and cold night, the shining firmament was crystal clear, ideal for stargazing. Her grandmother had been ill for years and the cumulative effect of worry on her mother was visible, she had developed a sort of short-range agoraphobia which had left her unable to travel more than a few miles from her own mother. This was no more evident that when it began to snow, the outright panic she would suffer at the idea she might be unable to reach her mother if needed was palpable as soon as the first flakes fell. 
 
 On this night in particular Whitney suspected her mother would not have been able to tell the curious effect of snow falling from cloudless, starry sky was nothing more than an optical effect. Brought about by the offset of a particularly clear atmosphere and wispy clouds, high in the atmosphere, outside of the limits of what the the human eye can detect against an inky background. She somehow doubted it would matter. 
 
 As the first ice cold specks fell gently against her warm, already wet cheeks Whitney too felt relief.
