We propose a novel photonic circuit element configuration that emulates the through-port response of a bus coupled traveling-wave resonator using two standing-wave resonant cavities. In this "reflectionless resonator unit", the two constituent cavities, here photonic crystal (PhC) nanobeams, exhibit opposite mode symmetries and may otherwise belong to a single design family. They are coupled evanescently to the bus waveguide without mutual coupling. We show theoretically, and verify using FDTD simulations, that reflection is eliminated when the two cavities are wavelength aligned. This occurs due to symmetry-induced destructive interference at the bus coupling region in the proposed photonic circuit topology. The transmission is equivalent to that of a bus-coupled traveling-wave (e.g. microring) resonator for all coupling conditions. We experimentally demonstrate an implementation fabricated in a new 45 nm silicon-on-insulator complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (SOI CMOS) electronic-photonic process. Both PhC nanobeam cavities have a full-width half-maximum (FWHM) mode length of 4.28 μm and measured intrinsic Q's in excess of 200,000. When the resonances are tuned to degeneracy and coalesce, transmission dips of the over-coupled PhC nanobeam cavities of -16 dB and -17 dB nearly disappear showing a remaining single dip of -4.2 dB, while reflection peaks are simultaneously reduced by 10 dB, demonstrating the quasi-traveling-wave behavior. This photonic circuit topology paves the way for realizing low-energy active devices such as modulators and detectors that can be cascaded to form wavelength-division multiplexed links with smaller power consumption and footprint than traveling wave, ring resonator based implementations.