The Bucket List
The list was in the coffee tin where Chris kept his passport, folded into eighths and soft at the creases from being folded and unfolded by younger hands. The fifteen items were written the summer he turned twenty-two, and he could see that the blue ink was now fading noticeably. He spread the paper flat on the kitchen counter, in the apartment that as of yesterday afternoon would be only his, and counted the checkmarks. Thirteen.
If Chris had stopped to ask himself what he was looking for on that list, then he would have to have admitted it was for evidence. Yes, that was the honest word for it. Somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, between the drive home from the restaurant and the long evening of not calling anyone, Dana’s words had wormed their way into his head. They had burrowed deeper than he realized that morning, and he had since decided the only way to get them out was to hold his life in his hands and look at it.
Thirteen of fifteen. Most people never finished a third of these things. He sat at the counter and waited for the number to mean something.
“Skydive” was fourth on the list, checked in 2019. In the tin there was a photograph from the drive back to the hangar that day. It showed a man in a yellow jumpsuit grinning against a smear of green farmland, and he knew the man was him because of the crooked incisor. Chris also recalled that they had presented him with a certificate about a half hour after that photograph was taken, and surely it would have his name on it. Evidence… he supposed. What he remembered most, though, was all the preliminary paperwork. Initialing beside the word “death” four separate times. He remembered the drive home, a gas station somewhere outside Ellenville, a hot dog he ate standing up. Between the paperwork and the gas station there should have been a door opening at thirteen thousand feet, sixty seconds of his body understanding something bodies are not supposed to survive, but when his mind reached for it, he instead found only the photograph and the certificate. The grin in the picture was enormous, but from the inside, he had no idea what it felt like.
“See the northern lights,” seventh, checked in 2022. He recalled Tromsø for four nights with a tour guide named Espen who kept a thermos of blackcurrant syrup and hot water. He could reconstruct the parking lot where the vans stopped, the specific misery of standing in minus eighteen while his phone died in his pocket. Of the lights themselves, though, he had Dana’s account, which she had told at dinners for years afterward. She would refine the story a little each time, noting the way the green curtain moved like something breathing, and somewhere in the retellings her version had paved over whatever he’d actually seen, until the aurora itself felt more like a story he’d simply stood next to. Chris recalled how he had checked the box the night after with the hotel pen while Dana showered, and sitting at his counter four years later, even though he could hear the water running, he still could not see the sky.
There were other list items he barely paused on. “Learn guitar” was checked, despite the guitar itself being sold in 2021. “Swim with whale sharks” was also checked, and he was sure Isla Mujeres (which he had noted next to the line item) must have been lovely. “Eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant” had been checked, though the only way Chris was able to recall the restaurant’s name was because of the receipt in the tin.
“Run a marathon” was eleventh, and it was the one he had told at parties, because it had a number attached, 4:41, and numbers made it easy to tell. The medal was in the tin too, along with the red-silk ribbon that had been worn once and only once. He remembered training for it for months (or rather, he remembered that he had trained for months, a distinction that was now becoming clear). Of the race he now only recalled two things: a blister that filled his left sock with blood by mile nineteen, and a volunteer at the finish pressing a banana into his hand as though it were urgent.
What Dana had said, yesterday, in the small vacuum after the big thing had been said and the divorce named out loud, was that she had spent eleven years waiting to find out what he wanted. She had said it with sadness rather than cruelty, and that was what made her words impossible to ignore.
The last two unchecked items were “learn to sail” and “see the Serengeti.” Looking at them now he understood that nothing prevented him from doing both within a year if he chose to.
He found a pen in the kitchen junk drawer. The list had plenty of room at the bottom below item fifteen. He felt certain that his younger self must have left the extra room there deliberately. Room to grow? He put the pen’s felt tip against the paper and made a small dot where the number sixteen would go, and waited for something to come.
He thought of things other people wanted. He thought of the ocean and of languages and of pretty little cabins in a meadow somewhere and of learning to make bread. Each possibility arrived with its own little borrowed moment of excitement before going cold in his hand. The refrigerator cycled on, and down on the street a car door shut. Chris knew that he could sit there for as long as he wanted, because he had nowhere to be and no one waiting for him. He also knew that the dot beneath his pen tip would continue to grow larger for as long as he chose to stay motionless.