Cold so cold you feel like a crime scene -- flashbulbed open into a tremulous lesion policed by bright yellow tape.

You stay out too long and too late and come back pink as a rare flank steak. You Google hypothermia. Just in case.

You decide you're like vodka. You can stay in the freezer as long as you like without getting burned.

So you go to a party with a six-pack in your purse and even though you've been sad, or maybe even because you've been sad, you laugh and talk and laugh all night long and it feels really, really good.

Cold so cold you turn on every single light and keep all the candles burning.

You simmer a soup on the stove until the kitchen window steams over with mist and fog.

You cheer yourself up with different kinds of apples: Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, and Delicious.

The kittens sequester themselves in your armpits at night. You sequester yourself like a snail in its shell.

You wait for the pending depression to cash itself in like a bounced check ricocheting into an overdrawn account.

You think if you stay inside and don't leave the house, you can avoid the angry villagers with their sticks and flame.

You keep telling yourself you're like vodka. You can stay in the freezer as long as you like without getting burned.

Outside, late at night in the Hy-Vee parking lot, wind Spirographs the snow under the metal halide parking lot lamps and everything is a frozen discotheque of glitter, glitter, glitter . . . and you think you could stay out there in that beautiful deadly tundra forever.