I shaved carefully and put on my suit. I had an excuse to look my best and I knew, I knew you might be there. I sat alone in the front row and examined the set. I was right, you walked in with a friend and called hello to some people in one of the rows behind me. I stood up then, and turned.

She looked directly at me and stopped. I looked her in her eyes as I've done a hundred times before and tried to remember to smile. She didn't recognize me, not all of me, and our eyes passed that millisecond moment when a glance becomes a stare.

Each sliver of a second was a shard of mirror. In one I was reflected as woeful, left alone and unknown, a stranger now to her memory. In another I am happy, looking in her eyes again and seeing something other than a woman wronged in heart and mind. I was just a vague familiar, and I confess I was satisfied with that, or at least I mean to be.

I've not experienced this before, this being forgotten. It's an odd satisfaction; I meant to stay away and I must have done it well. Of course it helped that I was long of hair and partly bearded, wearing glasses and not dressed like a scruffian.

But I needed exactly that, this time. Now I can accept that this, these dreams of her and regrets and wondering what I could have been, if I had left the best part of me when I left her, this is mine and only mine. She doesn't need to know these things. Time and a change of grooming habits have let me become nobody. And after years of being that other person to her, nobody is a name I accept with gladness. And if hubris does not bid me shout out my true identity, perhaps I can sail safely away to some port beyond where I will not break every promise to change.

Some place where it won't matter that I still love you.