Most endings come with a slammed door. The one in "if theres a victory" arrives as something smaller and crueler: texts that get shorter, conversations that go cold, a person who is a little further away every time the speaker looks. The poem mourns a closeness, perhaps a friendship, perhaps something that grew out of one, that peaked on a single night and has been sliding ever since. Its central idea sits in the last three lines. When a bond dies, the only "victory" left is to forget the other person first, and the speaker refuses to compete.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines are short, lowercase and speech-like. Even the title drops its apostrophe. That lack of polish feels deliberate, or at least fitting, because the poem reads like a thought typed in the middle of a bad night rather than something arranged afterwards. Rhythm comes almost entirely from punctuation. "my dream. / my. fucking. dream." is the clearest example. The phrase is repeated, then chopped by full stops until each word lands separately, with the profanity wedged in the middle like something said through clenched teeth. The happiness is remembered with fury, because remembering it now hurts. Even inside that happy memory the time keeps shrinking: "for a moment / just for a night." The speaker seems to know, even while describing it, how little there was.
Then the poem interrupts itself. "god / why am i still writing about this" is the moment the speaker catches herself or himself in the act of making the poem, and the self-disgust escalates fast. First "go ghost," then the bleakly sarcastic "better yet, / i should just drop dead." Each option is a way of cutting the memory off at the root, and each is presented as a punishment. What follows is flat and calm: "loving this memory will never bring it back." After the outburst, the sentence sounds almost like a proverb. The speaker knows the sensible conclusion and can't live by it. The tenses mark the break as well, from "was living a dream" to the blunt present of "now we argue."
The decline is told partly through form. "the texts get short" is itself a short line, and "the conversations go cold" borrows a temperature, as if the friendship were a drink left out. The longest line in the poem is the most painful: "i see you walk away more times than i see you come forward to me." It is a tally, and the speaker has clearly been counting. The slightly formal "come forward to me" makes the line feel carefully worked out, as though the speaker needs to be exact about the unfairness. Two quieter details follow. They "told each other almost everything," and the word "almost" admits that even the best closeness had locked rooms. And "now i barely know who you are" shows that the loss here is not hatred but strangerhood.
All of this prepares the ending. "no one wins this time" is a small phrase with a large implication: "this time" suggests that earlier arguments might have had winners, but this one is different. The final sentence then sets up a contest and walks away from it. "Of who forgets who first" turns forgetting into a race, and "i don't ever want to win" turns the usual logic upside down, since winning would mean losing the person completely. It also quietly cancels the earlier "i should just go ghost," which was a wish to forget first. The poem's own existence backs up the refusal. By writing about the memory, the speaker has already chosen to lose.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't tidy anything up. There is no villain and no single event to blame, only a slow drift measured in message length and silences, which many readers will recognise. It also lets the speaker contradict themselves honestly, wanting to forget and refusing to, scorning the memory and clinging to it, and it ends not on a lesson but on a stubborn kind of loyalty.