I didn’t even understand the reading but I want to go inside. I still don’t know him very well, I think to myself, as we stand outside of Ballantine Hall. He wears a down coat. I wear a down coat and boots. We both smoke. He says, “Let’s skip” and I say, “But I actually did the reading” and he says, “You stay then” and his hands are shaking from the cold. I can’t tell where smoke stops and breath starts.

I think about the time we went to that lecture on thermal expansion and sat in the back row and whispered to each other. We shared a red spiral notebook and played hangman. He had to go for extra credit but he wasn’t taking notes so he didn’t get the credit anyway. We left Woodburn Hall and walked down 7^th street back to his car and I sat facing him on his lap in the driver’s seat and pressed my back into the steering wheel. We shared a cigarette out the window and looked at each other and didn’t speak.

The door to the building opens and there’s a rush of warmth. I want to go in. He covers his ears with his beanie. He holds the cigarette in his mouth while he moves it. I’m ready to throw my cigarette behind me and walk in. But I don’t. I watch him figure something out in his mind, a theory that he doesn’t need to be here, he doesn’t need this place, or me, or anyone, and he’ll be just fine without any of it. The tutoring, the novel, the short story about the men on a boat throwing over soggy rum boxes, the friends at his house that stay uninvited, the tapestry of the mandala, the weed cookies, the acid he took last weekend.

Maybe the only thing that matters is the hiking trip he’s planned. And when he goes on it come summer he only makes it a few days before he blows out his knee and has to come home, back here, to Bloomington, Indiana, and we only see each other again next year at a party when we’re both with other people who we don’t love, but right now we don’t even love each other. Right now one of us wants to stay and the other wants to go. Right now he lights another smoke and I toss mine into the snow and it goes out instantly.