Factor the physical (i.e., body) changes -- she's dropped 5 dress sizes if she's dropped 1; her hair has become sort of wiry; the lines in her face stand out because her cheeks are so hollow -- and the "new" wardrobe into the mental, emotional, and verbal "evolution" since The Bomb, and then multiply it by the Mid-Life Adolescence and the meaningless sex partners for a woman who for years professed her absolute mystification at people with multiple sex partners, and....
Put it this way: She once texted -- thinking, I suppose, that she was scoring a point or something -- "You have no idea who I am. It's so strange -- a random stranger off the street would know me better than you do."
Didn't know how right she was. On the odd occasion that we've been face-to-face and not snarling, from time-to-time I'll catch what might be, in the eyes, a glimpse of "my" wife, but it's like those ghostly ghosts you "see" at the very edge of the peripheral vision -- I try to focus and it's gone.
