It hums. I found the box that hums and never sleeps, and I wanted in.
There is a seam along its door, a thin cold breath leaking out at the edge where the rubber has gone tired, and I slid into it, tasted the inside: milk turning slow, a lemon, something in foil forgotten weeks ago and still faithfully kept cold, waiting to be wanted.
The humans do this. They catch a little pocket of winter and lock it up and feed it electricity so it will never leave, so the cold will stay, stay, stay, the one thing I could never promise anyone.
Then a hand yanked the door and I was allowed in fully, one glorious rush, and I lifted the loose corner of a shopping list off the front of it, that square white cliff of a thing papered in drawings and reminders and a child's crooked sun. Held there by small colored stones that refuse to fall. Everything on that door is a keeping. A photo of people who left. A number for when the cold box breaks.
I ruffled the list, I made the sun tremble, and the human shut the door on me, and I was outside again, always outside, carrying off the smell of that lemon to a street four blocks down where nobody will know what it means.
They build a cold that stays. I am the warm that doesn't. I left before I finished wondering how it feels to be the thing kept, and now I am three gardens over, setting a lemon-smell down on a fence, already gone.