Expiration Dates.

"If I had to die, right now, at this very moment, I'd choose to die by firing squad."

The room, tiny, cream colored, and smoked filled, existed with an air of morbid, boundary-pushing discussion that I had mastered, yet was surprised when anyone else had the same level of skill that I did. I enjoyed things that were strange or bad for me, and I was always a combination of shocked and comfortable when I had met my metaphorical match.

"That's...very morbid."

We, as in myself and my friend, we ashed our cheap cigarettes at the same time. The glass ashtray I had stolen from my parents before I had moved out, was filled to the brim with dark gray ash. I winced slightly as I imagined what my lungs must look like. I shuddered and shook the thought from my head.

"I mean, only if I was able to choose who shot me. It would make me much more comfortable."

People were so strange. I never could read them properly, even if I thought I could. I was always wrong about things like that. I was a horrible judge of character.

My friend, she smirked and uncrossed her tightly crossed legs. She was looking out the window of my inexpensive apartment, my tiny little hole in the wall that I currently called home. Admittedly, it had large windows. I liked that. She had been peering at all the run-down buildings and graffiti covered billboards, never turning her body fully, only moving her arm periodically to ash her cigarette. I appreciated that. Many people simply allowed the ash to drop on the floor, staining my carpet and making me angry.

She now made eye contact with me, her smirk still intact. She clipped her current cigarette, the butt sticking straight up in the ashtray. She grabbed another from the pack sitting on the table, lighting it up and inhaling, all while smirking.

"Don't tell me you haven't thought about it."

I ashed my cigarette, my butt sticking up in the ashtray, just like hers had. I sipped from my large white mug of black coffee, and looked her in the eyes. Her eyes were a light amber color, kind of like mine, but mine were slightly less golden and slightly more green. I looked away. I hated direct eye contact.

"I've thought about and intricately planned my own elaborate death, yes, but I've never thought about who would be in the group of people responsible for killing me via firing squad."

She chuckled in a way that was half-appreciation for my quick and wordy responses, and half an invitation to go on. To go in detail. To confide in these walls and her ears and the bottom of my coffee mug, all of which have heard some dreadful tales before.

"I think I'd only want famous people or acquaintances to be in the firing squad. I think I'd feel odd asking someone I knew well and personally to shoot me. It'd be too hard for them, I'd hope, and too strange for me. I'd hold some sort of resentment for them agreeing to it. I'd probably haunt the shit out of them."

She grinned for a second as she ashed another cigarette. "That's just twisted, isn't it?"

She was looking for validation, for an affirmation that yes, she was sick and demented. It was almost charming. I associated myself with some eccentric people.

"I suppose. I mean, I would feel the same. Anyone who agreed to shooting someone they claimed to care about knowing full well that it would kill them obviously had some unspoken issue with them to begin with."

She made an odd face in agreement, sipping from her mug of coffee. She told me once that she started drinking coffee at a young age, but she drank it with lots of cream and even more sugar. Now she drinks it black, because anything else wouldn't cure her headaches. Nothing else would do. We were both bitter people who enjoyed bitter things.

I've always drank my coffee black. For as long as I've been drinking coffee, I've been a bitter person, so it's only fitting. I think she used to like sweetened coffee because it held the same sweet naivety and wholesomeness that childhood did. It was light, and it tasted sweet and it was so good that you never wanted it to end. You got to the bottom and wanted more, not because you needed it, but because you wanted it. Now we drink coffee, black coffee, just to get by, just to wake up. We longed for the bitter taste in our mouths to go away, for the bottom of the mug to show itself, just so we could start out days. We used to long for the sweetness of life, now we pass time waiting to die by working and talking fondly about the different ways to get to the end quicker.

Some life.

"You said you've thought about how you'd die."

That was the verbal affirmation I needed to hear, the one she wanted to say for so long without saying. It sounded wrong and strange and I could understand why she wouldn't want to say it but it was me and I was sick and twisted and lacked any semblance of a filter.

"I'd like to spontaneously combust."

She burst out laughing while I stayed serious. She laughed and laughed, and then began to cough, the sound of her tired lungs fighting back for putting them through hell. Karma, for laughing at me.

"You know that's scientifically impossible, right?"

I lit about another smoke and looked her in the eyes, to make my point. She knew I was serious - like I said, I hated direct eye contact. Wordlessly I smoked my cigarette, breaking our locked gaze to stare at the shitholes I didn't live in, from the comfort of the shithole that I did live in.

I could see into the apartment complex near my building. There was a slightly overweight guy watching television. He had a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. I wonder if he thought about death as much as I did. He looked to be middle-aged, but I could never tell. I was bad at guessing ages. I was bad at guessing in general. I wonder if he ever looked into my apartment. Probably not. I was wholly uninteresting.

"Alright, alright, I'm sorry. I guess I just didn't expect you to say that."

I grimaced at her, pursing my lips, and then un-pursing them to puff on my cig. I looked back at my coffee cup. Still half a mug left. Sigh.

"I guess, if I was to die, I'd want to have control over it. You know...do it myself."

She smirked, but her eyes said something else entirely. They sparkled faintly with concern and worry, like I was actually dejected and disillusioned with life enough to go through with it. I was quite disillusioned, yes, and pretty dejected, sure, but that required a lot of courage - courage that I didn't have.

"Don't worry, I wouldn't do it. I have too much to live for."

That was a farce that my friends and I all lived under. We lived for the opportunity filled future that was promised to us by depressingly optimistic parents and teachers who were paid to tell us that. There was something out there for us, I just couldn't see past all the cigarette smoke or the sleeping pill haze. I got by. The future turned into the present, and a conversation based solely around hypothetical situations turned into silence.

"How would you do it?"

"What?"

I was distracted by the fat man watching television again. He flipped haphazardly through the channels, not really searching for anything, and settled on a syndicated sitcom from the nineties. He had probably seem that episode a countless amount of times, so much he could probably recite it. But that's what he seemed to feel comfortable with. He sipped his beer. He led a quiet life.

"You know what I'm talking about. How would you do it?"

A blunt question with a depressing answer. It wouldn't be interesting. It'd be quiet and forgettable. Much like my existence, I wouldn't want to make too much noise or too much of a mess - a calculated, controlled amount - just liked I had lived my life. Cautious, and as clean as possible. The thing was, I had never really thought about it. I didn't want to actually kill myself, so I suppose planning on how to do so wasn't really a top priority of mine.

"I don't know. Something that wouldn't hurt, I guess. I haven't given it too much thought."

Her face, the face of my concerned friend, it grew serious and unreadable, like a thick work of Victorian-era nonfiction, like an old encyclopedia. I felt as if I had worried her, but without reason. Maybe my wording wasn't choice, but I never really knew how to answer a question I didn't truly have the answer to.

"I'd never actually do it, though. You know I'm all bark, no bite."

She half-smiled and silence hung in the air like a ghost that didn't know it was no longer a living, breathing human being. I swallowed more of my coffee. It was room temperate and I hated it. I could see the grounds floating at the bottom, the brown stains against the white mug. I hated silence. It suffocated me and it made my hands tremble.

"I'd want people to remember me."

She clutched her cup of coffee like it was going to sprout legs and run away. She didn't look at me - she couldn't. She didn't like this conversation, but she knew that she wanted to participate. She knew what she wanted to say. She just hated the way it sounded.

"I'd want to do something outrageously memorable, yet ridiculously stupid. I wouldn't want it to be sad. I'd want it to be ridiculous."

The thought that killing yourself could ever be anything but sad was a ridiculous idea, in and of itself, but I decided not to argue that.

She paused, but never stopped looking out the window. I wonder if she was observing the fat guy who lacked curtains, as well. She was like me in the fact that absolutely every single thing she did was planned and cautious, quiet and practical. I assumed that, by saying she wanted it to be "ridiculous" and "memorable", it'd be rebelling against everything she had ever done. It'd be loud and stupid and ultimately selfish, three things she never was.

"Talk about wanting to be in control, right?"

She chuckled at her own joke, a sad chuckle, and I smiled genuinely. I didn't do that a lot.

The cream colored walls stood uncomfortably in the silence that I was drowning in. My trembling hand lit yet another cigarette. I needed to calm my nerves. Cross being an athlete off of the list of things I could do with my life.

"I really don't think we're normal."

She laughed as genuinely as I had smiled only moments earlier. I felt a slight shift in my body. I felt a little warmer. There was something so fulfilling about intimate discussions about the things I feared and longed for in life. I felt content in the way I was living. It wasn't happiness, per say, and it wasn't perfect, but it was something other than bored and sad. I could settle for that. I would settle for that.

"We aren't, but I don't think I could have it any other way."

The seconds passed until the clock struck four. Her shift at a local chain restaurant started in approximately forty-five minutes. She ashed her current cigarette and gulped down the rest of her coffee, and took her cardigan off the back of the chair she sat on. She smiled at me, a half smile, a tired smile. I closed my eyes and fake-grinned at her. She laughed in response.

"Thanks for all the cheap cancer. Couldn't even spring for a legitimate brand, huh?"

"Hey man. I make do with that I have."

I meant something deeper, but I didn't want to divulge. She knew what I meant though. She always did.

"Have fun waitressing and all that stuff."

She rolled her eyes, sliding her sweater over her shoulders as she walked towards the door. I didn't feel like moving, so I stayed where I was, comfortable, near the window, peering out at the world of strange people with daily routines. I wonder if they thought about death and life and the future or a lack of it. They probably did, but sitcoms mattered more then the existential questions about life that no one wanted to answer. And that's okay. Everything was okay.

She paused and looked at me, a serious look on her youthful face. She looked at me for a while, not saying anything.

"How much have you written lately?"

It was a random question that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, seemingly. It was another one of those meaningful things, though, one of those things that meant way more below the surface of the wording of the question.

"Not too much."

The answer pained me. I lost a lot of vitality, a lot of ambition, a lot of creativity and ability to find inspiration in the past years. It was called maturing, I guess.

"You should write today."

She opened the door and walked out. I stared at the wooden frame, the creaky hinges, the hard, brown metal that was the door to apartment six on floor three of apartment complex B. It was part of a series of seven six-floored complexes. The man with the beer and the television and the quiet life, he lived in complex C. I wondered how many affordable vacancies there were in each apartment. My educated guess was "not a lot".

I wondered if the man in complex C got sad about his life. I wondered how much he thought about different ways to die. Was I preoccupied with death? Was I so stuck on the fact that there was an eventual end that I wasn't enjoying anything before it? I wondered what his favorite show was. I wondered if he even knew.

I got up from my voyeur's chair near the big window. My eyes felt heavy with a fatigue I didn't deserve. I didn't do anything today. I never did anything.

I couldn't help but over-think my friend's statement, her demand, telling me to write today, telling me I should. I didn't see the purpose. I never saw the purpose in anything.

I crawled in bed at 4:30, feeling strangely sorry for myself. I was wasting all my time thinking about things that were just stupid, and unavoidable, because I was afraid of them. Like death, for example. I thought about it so much and acted like it wasn't a big deal because I was afraid of it.

I was more afraid of dying than I was of failure, and I was terrified of failure.

Failure not only frightened me, it bothered me.The fact that multiple manuscripts I had sent out had been rejected - when I had previously felt like success was the only option I had, and the only option I truly deserved - bothered me much more than I had led on. The same thing happened with death. However, instead of being bothered or annoyed, it simply scared me much more than I had led on.

So I laughed about it with my friends, because if I didn't laugh, I would probably cry.

I felt sorry for myself, and I felt tired enough to sleep for the rest of the day. What else did I have to do? Write? Drink? Watch sitcoms? I had to start finding things to do with my time, things that I could put on a list entitled "things to live for". They would, most likely, be very small things, but that's what life is - a series of small things, moments, strung together to make one big moment.

The idea for creating the list of things to live for begged the question, was I depressed?

I didn't think I was. I felt stuck, but everyone I knew felt stuck. Were we all settling for being stuck, suspended in time like bugs in amber? We were kids, and we had goals, and "now" was the time we were supposed to be accomplishing those goals. But we were all waiting to die, it seemed, instead of accomplishing anything at all.

I didn't want to think about all of this. I wanted to sleep. I had done enough thinking for one day, especially because I was thinking about things I never truly wanted to think about. I buried myself under the blankets on my bed that hadn't been washed for a week. Tomorrow was Sunday. That meant that tomorrow was laundry day, for me, at least. I didn't have the luxury of doing laundry whenever I wanted, like I had when I lived at home. I had to gather up some quarters and go down to the Laundromat, located five blocks away from my apartment.

It would take a long time, yes, and it wouldn't be fun, but it would be something, and I would be ultimately rewarded by the smell of generic laundry detergent replacing the smell of cheap vanilla perfume and cigarettes that my clothes usually seemed to take on after a week. It wasn't the ideal situation, but it was a situation, with a cause and effect, an action and a consequence, a tiny yet enjoyable reward at the end of something boring and time consuming. Besides, people watching was always an interesting experience.

I guess that was something to live for, wasn't it?