The way people from the past resurface and remind me of things I had forgotten – things that meant so much at the time, but life has slowly and imperceptibly erased…

A Woman Meets an Old Lover (Denise Levertov)

‘He with whom I ran hand in hand
kicking the leathery leaves down Oak Hill Path
thirty years ago,

appeared before me with anxious face, pale,
almost unrecognized, hesitant,
lame.

He whom I cannot remember hearing laugh out loud
but see in my mind’s eye smiling, self-approving,
wept on my shoulder.

He who seemed always
to take and not give, who took me
so long to forget,

remembered everything I had so long forgotten.’