A man is looking to reconnect with a woman he says unknowingly saved his life more than 40 years ago during a rain storm.

In an anonymous ad under the Craigslist personals section, the man recalls a story of a chance meeting in the streets of Boston on New Year's Eve.

“You'd taken shelter under the balcony of the Old State House. You were wearing a teal ball gown, which appeared to me both regal and ridiculous,” the man wrote.

The man says he was an Air Force pilot who had just returned from a bombing run over Vietnam. He writes about the guilt and shame he felt, but he says when he saw this woman his whole perspective changed.

“When I joined you under the balcony, you looked at me with your big green eyes, and I could tell that you'd been crying. I asked if you were OK. You said you'd been better,” he wrote.

>>Read the man's full letter on Craigslist

A decision to get out of the rain and into a diner took the man and woman into Neisner's at Downtown Crossing, he says, where conversation lasted for an hour before he excused himself to use the restroom.

“On the way back to the counter, my heart thumped in my chest like an angry judge's gavel, and a future -- our future -- flickered in my mind. But when I reached the stools, you were gone. No phone number. No note. Nothing,” he wrote.

The man says for the next year he went to that same diner every day, and in the four decades since this chance meeting he never stopped wondering what happened and what could have been.

“I'm an old man now, and only recently did I recount this story to someone for the first time, a friend from the VFW. He suggested I look for you on Facebook,” he wrote. "This same friend has a particularly sentimental daughter. She's the one who led me here to Craigslist and these Missed Connections."

The man closes his letter not with asking the woman to contact him, but just by saying thank you.

"So wherever you've been, wherever you are, and wherever you're going, know this: you're with me still."

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