Come on and wave the damn torches already

She was always saying that we didn’t do enough things together, like maybe if we played more putt-putt or bowled under every blacklight and disco ball in town our problems would finally go away. It was autumn, and yeah, leaves were falling, and yeah, daylight savings time wasn’t doing us any favors, which maybe we could blame the sun going down so early every night for us looking at each other across the kitchen table and knowing we had the same idea.

The first time it was almost as a joke, but we got good at killing ourselves after awhile. Made an art of it. We would devote a whole evening, taking great fistfuls of pills and doing slow dances on the roof. Every morning, though, we’d wake up sweat-drenched in the noonday sun.

After we ran through our medicine cabinet we sat fidgeting on the couch watching the clock tick down the hours left in the three-day waiting period. His and hers handguns, hold in each breath, exhale and squeeze. The noise was something that we kept marveling at to each other. Did you feel it like it was inside your head like I did? Are your ears still hurting? God damn it was so amazingly loud. But we were among the living just the same. We tried a bunch of other ways, and then we started wondering if something was wrong.

We stumbled to the doctor’s office, sat in the waiting room holding hands and maybe a little happy again while impatient patients sat aghast. We didn’t blame them. We were covered in scars, rope burned necks, pockmarked livers, great sucking wounds in our chests. That last one’s a metaphor, but yeah, it felt good to be a team again.