Erica’s got a friend who works at a Miami hospital (which’ll go unnamed) and this friend of hers was talking in the group chat about something the hospital’s tryna keep outta the news: somebody died in their parking garage.

            Worse yet: people were walking by him for three days before they realized he was dead.

            Erica’s friend was one of the first employees who hustled out to assess the situation after somebody reported a car looking like it was fulla smoke.

            The guy who died is said now to’ve had lots of health issues. He’d come to the hospital to see his doctor and when he went back to his car after the checkup he apparently wasn’t feeling great. Reclined his seat all the way back in order to collect himself and then…died.

            It was a busy part of the parking garage, probably a few hundred people walked past him once he was dead, but the guy just looked like he was sleeping.

            Then he started decomposing and it fogged up the car.

            Erica’s friend took a photo of the dead guy’s face through the driver window and sent it to the group chat.

            She showed it to me.

            He looked almost exactly like the guy in this transformation scene from The Thing except he was purple and black and there were bugs over his eyes and his lips had pulled weirdly upward, leftward, so you could see his upper teeth and gums. There was something strangely anguished about his expression, like maybe he didn’t go quietly.

            Something about the hideous banality of this dude’s death, which went unnoticed for three days and culminated in his corpse getting photographed and posted in a group chat fulla nineteen-year-old girls, got me thinking in a new way about my own mortality. The fact that I’m gonna look like this dude at some point and that I too might just be some gruesome footnote in somebody’s Internet wanderings.

Not exactly a jolly thought, but it’s hanging around.