This is just a memory I’m having.
In the early days with one of my old boyfriends, we were lying in bed and I was telling him about this scene in a Tom Robbins novel where Tom considers the various ways to make love stick around. And I said one of the ways suggested was to wake love up in the middle of the night and tell it the world was on fire, then rush to the window and pee out it, then saunter back to bed and tell love everything was going to be all right now.
After I told him this, the boyfriend grabbed my shoulders and said “Look out, the world is on fire!” He rushed to the window, a third-story window, and peed out it. There was no screen, I should mention. The window was set back in the house a little and the second floor roof stuck out under it, but it was peaked, so the pee ran off it and onto the street. We could hear it all the way down; it was a long and complicated journey.
Finishing, the boyfriend got back into bed, but we were both giggling too hard for him to finish the last line of the game: “Everything’s going to be fine now.” I wonder if maybe this is where things began to go wrong.