I watched the smoke rise out Chamber Hall’s metal flue. It blew around slowly in the wind, shifting in shape and fading in the cold. Beyond that were tree branches and the sun sinking into the hills.

I was standing in front of the window, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt under my wool jacket. I couldn’t stop watching this smoke in the wind because it was there and leaving at the same time. I wanted to paint it. Set it to music.

I drew the blinds and went to dinner knowing I couldn’t do either. It was only smoke and I would only remember it. There would be no descriptions of the smoke to my friends or professors or strangers on the street.

I couldn’t write a news story with a headline that read, “Smoke blows beautifully in the cold wind.” There are more important things to capture us. Ideas about what we are going to be, or what we may someday have. That’s what moves us away from our windows and into the street.

I ate my dinner at a table of friends who talked about girls and assignments and I joined in, happy we weren’t talking about how smoke moves.

I’m not sure I know how to talk about that. I don’t know what to say except the event wasn’t on purpose but I couldn’t make happen again if I had a lifetime to try. Not just like it was then, and just what it meant to me. And that’s not so different from anything else that happens to us: love, mortgages, automobiles and poetry.

Here I am, a young man. And I’ve only done what I knew to do and it brought me to right here. A dorm room, dressed the way I am, feeling the way I feel. What I saw here was something that was going as quickly as it came.

Permanence would have ruined it. This moment was significant in its insignificance. I needed that—my whole life was impermanence passing through it.

That image has taken precedent in my heart like other things that are only things, like other people who are only people. Like me.

I wish I could assign some greater meaning behind them except for them happening. But that’s all I do know—and therein lays the blessing. Things continue to happen. The only thing life requires is that we continue to see them.

I looked around my table and down at my meal. My friends laughed at the ironies they’re always thinking to point out. I didn’t have anything to say. I only smiled, knowing this was all by some great mistake. I watched them and was them. My slow happiness was the absurdity here.

I walked back to the dorm on the salted sidewalk under the pine trees. The wind blew coldly and pulled wisps of my heat away from me.