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The wind is indeed pulling the red light out of your cigarette and sucking the smoke into caustic ribbons of grey taffy, young man. You are holding onto it, pinching its head between your thumb and first two fingers, cupping your hand falcate around it like a crescent moon, shielding it from the wind, conserving the tobacco from smolder, trying to hold onto all the glow without smothering it. This is the way I remember you--fat, quick with a joke or a big word, meticulous about the way you pose or your avalanche gait, something slightly pastoral and slightly ecclesiastical--like a sturdy old church in the country that gathered gravestones within its boundaries; stout and surrounded by a field stone wall; an assembly that gathers the rustic, but also the sanctimonious. One day you made up your mind, filed that duality, and went on your way, but I'm sure I saw you the other day at midnight, raving while the wind dragged your cigarette. The same wind parted your hair and tugged a rare January leaf down the street on fishing wire--enticing bums with dollars they can't have--all the while you laughed.