“Emergent” is the word he has been using to describe his newly sober self, deployed correctly or otherwise as some much-needed spur, and with his flesh again healed to that condition as will permit, understands the time has again come to re-commence shaving his face, as per instruction.
Having washed and lathered his cheeks, chin and upper neck, it is only when he of necessity confronts himself in the little mirror, and moves to pull the razor blade across his erratically stubbled skin, that he comes aware of what he initially determines must be imagined: a momentary time lag between himself and his reflection attributed at first, and perhaps explicably so, to simple fatigue, or to the interplay of shadows cast from both the window’s twilight and the bathroom’s overhead illuminated bulb.
Moving his head this way and aside, his original bewilderment at the phenomenon takes a sudden sinister turn as it becomes increasingly and blatantly obvious this suspected divergence between the two selves is indeed not only real but, more alarmingly, beginning to widen.
The understanding he watches an iteration of himself he is in the process of leaving behind creates a sense of unease, and yet he shaves on regardless, the mirror trailing him to such a degree as to prove of little use in the actual act. When he finds himself to have finished he is now several minutes ahead of his reflected self, which he watches in its own eventual completion of the same activity, his already cold-water washed face watching him watching him back, and wondering to what extent this delay will ultimately develop, if there is in fact any finite limit to its slowly incremental growth, how many eventual minutes or even hours might tick over between his any gesture or movement made right this second now, and it’s subsequent occurrence visible upon the glass. Days, weeks, months even, perhaps longer.
Outwith its any such limit comes the realisation he could in fact simply walk away, leaving his reflection in abeyance until it is itself prompted likewise, the lag expanding throughout his continued absence, consequent to which he would on his eventual and ultimate return find the mirror empty long enough to comprehend his still anticipated and thus penultimate re-appearance as something he would not live to see.
It is this act as becomes the passive obligation forced upon his reflection to return again that final time, to look back in vain awaiting once more the arrival of its source, unaware that source is itself long years dead, and that death to spell of course its own eventual end..
