We’re in a dive bar, drinking well whiskey on the rocks. There’s a “best falls ever” compilation on mute. All I can think is this is the fucking life as a man jumps onto a trampoline and falls through it, keeps falling through the earth itself, forever, his whole body eventually shattered into nothing by the core.

I want to whisper “do you still love me” to you, but it’s too quiet in here. There’s little I fear more than being overheard.

Last call, the bartender says. I turn to ask you if you’d like another drink, but you’re gone. We’d been fighting about something neither of us will remember tomorrow. You’ve hit the point where you go to the bathroom to decompress.

A snowboard attempts to slow down but can’t. He crashes full speed into a fence. Why was the fence there? Why do we find beauty in destruction?

The bar lights come up and the video is turned off, leaving behind a Roku screensaver: a whole tiny city of purple scrolls past.

You still aren’t back, and all I can think is some calamity has swept you from here. Maybe I’ll see you again, one day, in a different video above a different bar, about you being sucked into the toilet and spit out in some other dive, in some other city, and returning to a man who looks like me but isn’t—not quite.

Goodnight, FailArmy. Goodnight, little broken world. Goodnight, love, which seems, in the darkness, to have slipped away.