Disappearing people

I'm having trouble lately with the feeling that people are ephemeral. I'm sure it's a left-over abandonment issue of some sort. I want to think that friends are friends forever, that people are there for me, that I have unconditional love out there. I definitely feel this way about family, especially since lately I've been getting to know family members I didn't really know before but still feel strongly connected to. But don't know how this is going to shake out among my friends.

I can "disappear" people in my life quite effectively, and I suppose I do it often. Have done it often just recently - all those boys that didn't work out, that went mad and clingy on me. After long, painful hours trying to repair the friendship, it just got worse and worse - they demanded more and more and I was getting less than nothing out of it, just anger and frustration and guilt - and so a clean and thorough break was the only solution. They still send little messages every now and again - the especially Autistic one just a few weeks ago when he saw something in the newspaper that somehow reminded him of me. I didn't reply. The way I've handled those very bad entanglements is to drop them, bar them from communications, and ignore them if they try to reach me.

But the ones I want to hear from, sometimes they go quiet for a while as well. And then you think, this is someone I shared experiences with, I enjoyed his company, we walked around looking out at the world together and had shared experiences, but now he's just an address in my email address book, just a name. Not a person. Is a person only a person if they're in touch with you? And is the person on the other end of an email conversation (or IM or etc) really a person anyway? I know, also from bad experience, that you can hide behind email, when you receive one you can project all sorts of things on their flirty and clever prose. Does this count as staying in touch? Is phone better? Video is definitely better - you get a much higher percentage of their presence, the way they move, their voice, their laugh. But what if the videoing stops? Do they go back to just a word in a memory chip somewhere? How do I sustain the friendships I want to keep?

I get the feeling they are all as insubstantial as smoke hanging in the air. If I lean on them, I will go straight through, and they will vanish. I don't lean on them. Sometimes they vanish anyway.

How do you conduct friendships these days, cyber-connected but new in town?

And once again, this doesn't apply to my family at all.