There comes a stage when people you once knew, with whom you have parted ways, effectively become strangers, in the sense that the likelihood of any future depth is almost the same as with someone you have never met. Yes, it is possible to reach out and reconnect with an old friend you lost contact with, or even a former partner with whom things faded gradually without an official ending. In such cases, the old bond can sometimes resurrect in a surprisingly vivid or even melodramatic way. And yes, it is also possible for context to transform a past connection: meeting a former colleague you once fancied, for instance, but where circumstances kept things formal, and later, in a different setting, discovering dimensions of them you never knew before.

But that is a different story from the kind of connection where all of the following are true: a) there was no real bond to begin with, b) the interaction—whether platonic or romantic—simply faded over time, and c) there is no natural context in which to encounter one another again, meaning the only way to reconnect would be through a deliberate, out-of-the-blue message.

In such cases, the people involved are known faces, not known people. You may be better off striking up a conversation with the first stranger you come across on the street—for they carry freshness, novelty, and unexpected potential for curiosity.

When a past connection lacked depth, emotional imprint, mutual momentum or whatever you may like to call it—and when a long silence has passed with no organic context—such a person essentially becomes a stranger. Psychologically, we tend to think of strangers as lying ahead in time: people we have not yet met. But it seems that strangerhood can be time-symmetric. Strangers can exist both before and after a relationship, not only in the forward-directed sense.

We often think of relationships as static entities, but they are really little life processes. There is no point trying to resurrect something that has long since senesced; it makes more sense to return to it only in memory, as one might symbolically lay flowers on a grave.