You’ll tell everyone it was mutual. You’ll tell everyone it was the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll tell Greg and Brian you’re not sad; actually, you’re ecstatic. How can you be sad when the future gently pulsates before you, ready and waiting? When anything could happen next?

You’ll say it louder than you otherwise might, if Greg and Brian are too focused on the emergency broadcast blaring on the TV above the bar.

You’ll drive home, even though your fingertips vibrate from the whiskey, because I won’t be there to chastise you. You’ll skid around emergency vehicles barreling in the opposite lane, the red and blue lights blurring like watercolors. You’ll notice that the surface of the lake is churning, waves frothing hungrily straight towards the sky.

You caught your first fish in that lake twenty years ago. Just a little guy, like you. In your version of the story, you tossed him back like your dad told you to. Now, you like to say, the lake bulges with his ancestors, a smooth silver mass, endlessly circling.

When you finally reach our—your—little house on the edge of town, you’ll notice that the sky is matte black, like someone painted over the constellations.

You’ll feel your way around in the dark, testing the switches.

In the morning, when birdsong is distant and muffled, when the sun is a sickly disc behind papaya-colored clouds and the breeze tastes like vinegar, you’ll fill the bathtub with water. Maybe you’ll realize that if I were there, I would talk you out of this. I’ve always hated disaster movies.

You’ll get a strange feeling that the lights are never coming back on, a feeling like the one we both had the first time we locked eyes across a crowded bar, a feeling like this is it.

When the clouds smother the treetops, when bits of bark pelt the roof like hailstones, when something like peach fuzz forms on the bathwater, when the building next door is half cloud-eaten, I guess you’ll do what you normally do when things don’t go your way. You’ll scream until your lungs ache. You’ll kick the front door until your foot forces an open mouth in it.

When the bathwater grows thick and foamy, when you hear the roof crumbling, when clouds seep in through the edges of the windows and rise from the vents like the ghosts we’d always joked about, when your neck and shoulders start to itch, you’ll try to preserve what you can. You’ll sweep up bits of wood and plaster with your hands and hold them like one might hold a tulip bulb before placing it in the earth.

As the house fills with clouds, cotton-thick and noxious-smelling, maybe you’ll think of the time we sprinted into the ocean in January, how we shrieked at the bitter shock of the salt water against our skin. Or maybe you’ll think of the neighbor’s cat, who used to visit the porch and rub his soft body on our shins. Or maybe you’ll think of the time we tasted durian fruit in Thailand, after everyone warned us about the stench, and we found it delicious.

Or maybe you’ll think about the first time you caught a fish. In your dad’s version of the story, which he told me at Nick’s wedding, his breath wine-rancid, you whacked that motherfucker against the side of the boat until it stopped flopping. Until its eye sockets gleamed empty. Until blood peppered your hands, until its skull tapped the aluminum siding, making the same hollow sound as my fingernail against my glass. And when you finished, your dad held your head against his soft chest as you sobbed. You’re not bad, he told you. Not just bad, at least. It’s not that simple.