These Are the Things You Think About Before You Freeze to Death Outside of the Shell Station

1.     The ice has frozen in sheets over the pavement, forming ugly, glassy panes that barely crack under the heel of your boot, but the snow is still beautiful, even lumped into three feet of sediment and frost.

2.     There is no snow in Bayou La Batre, where you were bred and beaten into the young man you are today— just soft earth and potholes. You spent summers filling them in with the brother who hates you, waging a guerilla war against the asphalt until your shirts were rich with sweat.

3.     Holding a slip of gum in your mouth before it went soggy. You spat it into the grass before worrying the gnatcatcher would peck too close to the sodden clot of sugar. It hopped away.

4.     Going home, dead tired and hungry.

5.     Your college degree in literature you never read. You won’t remember the book covers, but you will remember tapping the titles in blank search bars finger by finger, unloading summaries into your hippocampus, or your prefrontal cortex, or whatever the hell it’s called. It doesn’t come to you until just before you die.

6.     A bitter taste in the roof of the mouth.

7.     The way your mother talked about your little post-grad foray into Wisconsin and how the workman’s boots you wore weren’t insulated enough to keep your toes from falling off one by one. You picture them rolling against the sole as you flex them one last time.

8.     A patient moment when the singular, gentle thump of your heart startles you.

9.     The complicated introduction of an acid jazz song. There’s a failed teenage relationship somewhere within that phrase with some boy you think about occasionally.

10.  Deserving better than the parking lot he left you in, though he certainly deserved better than the recipe for the marinade you stole from your father, alongside his car. (He gave you the car last year, and it sits a mile down the road, where snow is cooling the engine and filling in the hole in your tire.)

11.  The recurring sweat spot under your right arm that you blot out with deodorant every morning. It pools under the pocket of your armpit and stains your bedsheets in the winter. You hate it, and you suppose you are right to hate it. It is disgusting.

12.  Hating your job, even when it’s okay.

13.  Loving the taste of blackberries. You always forget their sweetness but every season you remember that you like them. You used to rocket to the grocery where you would pick out one plastic container. Just that? the clerk would ask. Yes, ma’am, you’d reply and go home five dollars poorer. You’d pry open the container with your fingers and bite your sour-sweet tongue while chewing.

14.   Bears

15.  Faded pictures of blue balloons on your first birthday

16.  Summer rain

17.  The stain of urine on the front of your shorts

18.  The Amazon Rainforest

19.  Gnatcatchers

20.  “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

21.  Woodchips in your hands

22.  Sex

23.  A credit score

24.  Milkmen

25.  Toni Morrison

26.  I love you,

27.  I love you,

28.  I love you.

29.  And a bread basket.