“Yeah. I was there. I mean I was here but I was out there. And I don’t know how I got out there exactly. Like I kinda wished myself out there, I guess. I’d been thinking about it for a long time.”

“Colorado?”

“Yeah. I was right there. And like I kept seeing this cabin through the falling snow. Like golden light in the windows and smoke coming out the chimney. You know—and like firewood stacked up on the porch. But something was missing.”

“What was that?”

“This girl.”

“Oh. Your girlfriend?”

“No, this girl I’d like imagined would be out there.”

“She wasn’t there?”

“No. And that kinda like shocked me, you know?”

“Who was this girl?”

“I don’t know, but she wasn’t anywhere around.”

“An imaginary girl?”

“I guess. Yeah, I guess so. She wasn’t out there.”

“So you were disappointed about that?”

“Yeah, I was. Like that was the whole reason I’d come out of the cabin in the first place.”

“Oh, you’d been inside the cabin?”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t in there so I came outside in the snow and I was like looking back at it, seeing the lights and the smoke, but she wasn’t anywhere around. You know, like I was totally alone out there. And then I thought like why’d I come all the way out here to be totally alone? I had this like awful feeling about it. You know that feeling like you’re going to be sick. Like you might not ever see a human being again. Just—like alone. That’s all.”

“Is that when you had the thought?”

“What thought?”

“The thought that life is what’s happening to you while you’re making plans for something else?”

“I guess,” he says, and his eyes come back to me for a beat, then flee to the window again. “I don’t know. No, I didn’t have the thought right then. The thought came like later, I think.”

“Later?”

“Yeah, later.”

“After what?”

“I don’t know. After like something snapped; something popped right behind me. I think it was the oil.”

“Oh, for the wings? The fry oil?”

“Yeah. It started popping and crackling like—you know, when you throw fresh wings in there it kinda like explodes.”

“Right. So that brought you back here, when you heard that?”

“Yeah. I came back here.”

“And Colorado went away?”

“Yeah. It just like disappeared.”

“And that’s when you had the thought?”

“It must’ve been,” he says, and vanishes under the brim of his cap again.

“I’m proud of you, Dicky,” I tell him, and reach out and pat him on his cap, right above the word “WINGS.”