What if you worked in the bruthel, with me?
Bruthel? Do you mean brothel?
Yeah.
Down in New Orleans?
Sure.
That seems like a pretty severe breach in moral standards.
Breach? What does that even mean? You're so young.

This was the conversation that drove her to Louisiana, and when she was going south all the snow melted before her eyes, on the windshield, throughout the fields, and one day she relinquished her own grip on her shoulders, and she got a little less cold, too.

She resolved to stay there the rest of her life on the first night, spent with the tall and rugged type. His entrance to her room was marked by the loosening of his tie, the careless gesture of tossing his little duffle bag almost valiantly to the side. She didn't remember the thud, since her heart was beating hard and fast. Eventually she would blame the tempting light that crept through the windowpane, facing the back of her head, for the way every single sound matched the pace and the note of her breath, sometimes of her twitches, and always of her heart: bump, heavy exhale, scream, thud.

That was the reason, though. His heart beat a lot, too. That first night took fifteen minutes, and in those fifteen minutes his heart bore 1,350 beats. Hers had 1,650. The next night, his heart would beat 2,160 times in thirty minutes, but three years later, a little boy's would take 1,200 beats and hers would issue 830 in only ten. If you're curious, in her last five minutes, thirty-five years after, approximately 12,775 days, her heart beat 225 times. That's seventy-five seconds spent empty, collectively becoming the substance of the moment that would determine her conclusive reflections.

Two hours prior she had sent her only child to live with its supposed father. That's two hours and five minutes before she shot herself in the bathroom of the airport lobby. What a shitty way to die, she was mumbling to herself, but she was wrong.

Are we coming back?
Next year, if you like.
I don't ever want to leave.
But you hate it here.
I could go to a university here—right? I could stay in Louisiana.
You don't even need to think about that.It's never too early—when are you coming?

A future, any future, is a beautiful thing, and it is a beautiful reason to die.