A stranger

Hayden stared at the mirror.

The man gazing back was a stranger who seemed vaguely familiar, yet couldn’t quite be placed. A reflection in a carriage’s window of a man who caught the same train each morning. Someone otherworldly, yet somehow an echo. No, a simulacrum. Or something distant, but tenuously connected. Whatever, it wasn’t himself he was seeing. Or at least a self he recognized.

He closed his eyes and pressed the bridge of his nose, then ran his finger and thumb down across his cheeks.

How could be find himself again when he’d forgotten what he’d been like?