I raise my face toward the surface only to confirm that it is still there, that I am still assembled enough to be reflected. The light borrowed from the room presses against me and something gives way beneath the skin. Recognition is never neutral. The moment my features cohere in the glass, the flesh loosens its claim. Time does not pass, it just liquefies. Veins dull their color, cartilage softens, the mouth forgets its own closure. The mirror keeps a perfect distance while feeding on what it returns. Each glance advances the process. What should take years collapses into seconds. I look again to measure the damage and the act of measuring deepens it. Awareness accelerates rot. Vitreous clouds behind the eyes as if sight itself were expiring. Teeth sway, no longer anchored by certainty. The jaw begins to unthread language. I watch myself become less capable of naming what is happening while understanding it with unbearable clarity. Turning away does nothing. The image persists internally, replaying with more detail than the surface ever offered. I am compelled back to it, as if horror itself were a form of gravity. The face reforms just enough between glances to be legible again, just enough to continue the labor. Putrefaction does not arrive as collapse it arrives as refinement. Layers peel with patience. Identity sloughs quietly. I begin to sense the weight of repetition. This is not aging. This is punishment. The mirror is a summit I am condemned to climb, dragging myself upward only to arrive at myself again, more spent, more porous. There is no lesson waiting at the top. No release. Only proof that recognition is corrosive, that the self cannot survive sustained observation. The surface fractures eventually. Hairline cracks spread across the glass, but the shattering does not free me. Each shard holds a version of the same decline. Multiple angles, identical outcomes. There is no escape from reflection once the mechanism has begun. Even absence reflects. Even darkness carries my outline. When the eyes finally fail and collapse inward, when sight dissolves into pressure and heat, something reconstructs me. Not fully. Never fully. Just enough. Enough face. Enough coherence. Enough flesh to be seen again. The cycle resets without mercy or intention. I am Narcisyfus! I am Narcisyfus! I decay through recognition. And I will always look again.