Do you listen to ghosts? The stories they tell? Cautionary tales, the stories of how they died, or how they lived, all bleached with the grim pallor of nostalgia. I hope the story of my death is different, somehow; sharper, maybe. Like comic-book ink among a watercolor sea.

I was walking out to the car. Singing—whispering, really—along to the coldwave mix in my headphones. Not even the whole thing, just one acutely depressing line, caught from the entropic song.

“Do you really want somebody else?”

As I whispered it, again and again, I suddenly became terribly aware of my own voice. How it resounded about my skull, dissonant against the loveliness kissing my ears.

Sitting down, in the passenger side, my face buried itself my hands as naturally as my back fell against the seat and my knees bent into place. Into hands so gigantic, fingers suffocatingly spindly, like the spread legs of some great tarantula smothering me. I hated it. I hated this exhausted pose of reflection, feeling these icy spiders-feet, numb and somehow still so sensitive to everything.

I buried them deep within my sleeves to cope.

This bore with it a new problem. Bereft of numbness, buffeted instead by comforting fabric, my fingers became even more hypersensitive to the details of my face. I could feel it, feel it all. My brow, jutting against knuckle joints. Nose, slicing palms. In that moment, the tactile mirror cut me harsher than any impression cast from a looking glass.

This is how I’m seen.

This is who I am, in the eyes of the world; this face, and little more.

Any delusions of my own delicateness, beauty, were made just that, then: painful delusion. This realization of my features, that the features that stared back at me in the pictures I hated so—well, the facts stated themselves. So unlike those other biting truths, this one refused to scream itself, but simply stated, flatly and emotionlessly and bludgeoning, glowering with the same kind of cold hatred that the five-legged spiders carried as they danced about my face.

My sleeves still guarded me from the worst of that, to be fair, but my fingers still churned, searching within their fabric prisons. Frantically, looking for a way to escape this labyrinth, this twisting maze, balefully unaware. Unknowing, unseeing, as the dissonantly towering Minotaur had devoured their delicacy—no, not devoured it. Hunted beauty, stalked grace, bashed it about the head with a rock, and watched it die. Watched light flicker from it—from my—eyes, until they became glassy mirrors into a terrible and hairy visage. For fun. For sport.

Whatever held me together, kept me manifest, held me from going up in mist, it died that day. Perhaps you’d call it “ego death”; but it felt like a suicide. Maybe you’ve heard the urban legend of the “backseat slasher”? The creeping death who hides in the blindest of blind spots, waiting for drivers unaware? I'm not sure, but I think being alone in the car that day was worse.