I just realized something profoundly unsettling, and of course it happened at the weekly bridge game. Ten years, with these people. Ten years, every Tuesday afternoon, same table, same cheap coffee. We know each other’s bidding habits, our tells when we’re bluffing, who always forgets to cover their lead. We know if someone’s had a bad week by the way they play their dummy. And yet, this afternoon, someone mentioned something about a new local bakery, and I made some offhand comment about how my late wife, Susan, would have LOVED their croissants. Silence. Just… dead air. Then one of them, bless her cotton socks, looked at me with this kind of blank, polite curiosity and said, “Oh, you were married?” Like it was a revelation. Like the woman I spent forty-seven years of my life with, the mother of my children, the other half of my ENTIRE adult existence, was just a ghost they’d never even heard mentioned before. And the horrible part? It’s MY fault. I mean, I don't even — whatever. It’s not their fault. I never talk about her. I never talk about much of anything beyond the cards, or the weather, or how bloody awful the council is this year. When the kids were little, I was always "so-and-so's dad," then "the stay-at-home parent." And then, after Susan died, I just… became a bridge player. It's so easy to let yourself disappear into these roles, isn’t it? To let the little parts of yourself that aren’t strictly necessary for the immediate situation just atrophy. We do it, I think, as humans, we perform these little acts of self-erasure without even realizing it. We think we’re being polite, or not burdening others, or just keeping the peace. But really, we’re just carving off bits of our own history, our own identity, and tossing them away. Now I’m sitting here, 2 AM, looking at a picture of Susan smiling, holding one of those ridiculously oversized sunflowers she loved, and feeling this hollow ache. Not just for her, but for myself. For the me that existed before the bridge club, before the kids, before all the roles that became my life. I gave up so much of myself, so willingly, and for what? So that people at a card game wouldn't even know her name? What does that even MEAN, about my life? About HER life, if I’m the only one left to remember it and I’m too busy being… I don't know. A bridge player. It feels like a betrayal, to her and to the person I used to be. And the question that keeps circling in my head is: if I can disappear this easily, what else have I forgotten about myself? What else has just… evaporated? And would anyone even care to find out?