I was standing on the chair again. My belt was looped around my neck. The other end was wedged between the top of the door and the frame. Nothing had happened. No professional humiliation, no romantic rejection. There was no other man. There were no junk bonds or gambling debt, and there certainly was no doting wife who I could not stand to tell. There was just friction, an uncomfortable heat under my skin that grew the more I moved and with each other body I scraped awkwardly past as I rolled down the slope of another day. I had slept poorly the night before, there had been a short argument with a coworker, a printer had jammed, there was an entire high school female lacrosse team jogging along the sidewalk as I drove home. Friction. Friction and tight, escalating pressure. I couldn’t decide what to make for dinner. I punched the wall twice, screamed once, and apologized to the cat. Then I was standing on the chair again.

Once, at a small family party following my cousin’s christening, I met a great-uncle who was a county coroner. “He’s going to want to talk about his work,” my father warned me as we idled at the rear of a line of cars attempting to leave the church parking lot. “He always does. It’s terrible.” And he did want to talk about it. I could hear the baby, probably still recovering from the shock of cold water and foreign faces, crying in the other room as he talked about a women who had shot her live-in boyfriend in the gut. He had dragged himself outside and died forty minutes later below a swing set in a public park. I listened with teenage fascination.

He moved on to hangings. “The most important thing with a hanging,” he said, “is to figure out if it was a suicide or autoerotic asphyxiation. Suicides don’t always leave a note, you know, but you can save someone’s family a lot of pain–a lot of guilt and shame–if you can tell them that it was, well, an accident and the person didn’t mean to kill themselves. That’s why it’s so important to get it right. Imagine having to feel responsible for your husband or son’s death for the rest of your life, to wonder if you could have done something, to not even have a note to tell you why, and the whole time it was just a dumb mistake. The poor guy was just trying to get off.”

Christ, think about that. It’s easier for family and friends to live with the thought that their loved one died masturbating, literally died with his dick in his hand, than to think that he killed himself. It’s the suicide that would make them ashamed.

I felt the buckle pinch the skin above my collar. I leaned down to open the door and the belt tightened. I couldn’t reach the knob.