Just realised that title might not look flattering.  Bear with me.  I was thinking about people I've cared about who have disappeared from my life.
I'm not thinking of exes as such, that's a whole different category. Besides I'm in touch however loosely with most of them. Nor am I thinking of those that have died - no hope of seeing them again in this lifetime.
I'm thinking about friends:
- the best friend from primary school that I lost touch with nearly 20 years ago;
- the penfriends I stayed with on school exchanges;
- the secondary school friends that I thought I'd know forever but drifted once we were immersed in our new lives on campuses around the country;
- the university friends that somehow just I just didn't manage to keep in touch with.

My generation is very different from even my parents' generation.
We don't automatically stay in the same place - my husband and I both went away from home to go to university, and have lived abroad too. We've been drawn to the capital like so many people for the jobs that are on offer here, but we are not where our roots are and are not intending to return to there.
Even if we wanted to, the communities we grew up in are no longer there - our contemporaries have also moved on elsewhere and people who would not know us are the new communities. If they actually know each other - there's a scarily high number of people now who don't even know their next-door neighbours.

Growing up, I had a best friend. She had long blonde hair, I had long dark hair. We were once stopped by an artist on the way back from the playground - we refused to talk to her because she was a stranger well-trained children that we were - and then spent a happy afternoon (with our parents) playing in her garden wearing Victorian clothes while she took pictures that became beautiful paintings (her name was Dianne Flynn, you can see her pictures on the internet - I want to save up for one with me and my little bro in it for my 40th). My friend was called Catherine Rushton. We ended up at different secondary school and I've not really seen her since. She contacted my little brother about 6 years ago out of the blue to say was that him, to contact me and say where she now was. I couldn't get the email address she gave to work.
I'm keen to know where my French penfriend Caroline Simon, from Ambleteuse, is now. We used to get on brilliantly, but exams meant we missed a couple of visits ans never got back into the habit.
I'd love to know where Vikki Wiberg is now. She was a good friend at secondary school, but again not returning to our home town and living in different countries abroad meant we drifted. I know she's a lawyer now and she probably lives near me in London.
And as for university friends, I miss Penny Harris and Celine Gordine-Wright in particular.

This however is the age of technology. Surely anyone out in the working world leaves a trace, somewhere. So I googled them. The problem comes where names are common. Lots of Penny Harrises, lots of Caroline Simons.
Friends Reunited (remember that site?) was helpful. You can see the two paragraph summary that people submit about themselves. The best aspect of the site was that there was no need to get in touch if you didn't want to. You could just see that the people you used to know were ok, doing well, and leave it at that. But most people stopped updating their profiles around 2005.
The newer social networking sites help too - but each entails sending a friends request. Fine if there's a photo, but I'm not going to contact all 23 Caroline Simons on the Facebook France network just in case.
I guess if I had time I could look at friends lists and find the names of siblings or former mutal friends to be sure. But who has time to do that?
And there's a further complication. I've married and changed my surname. I may not be the only one. So it's possible that Penny Harris is now Penny something else - how would I ever know?

It is entirely possible that none of these people would ever want to hear from me again, and that is their choice. They probably have full rich lives and have no need for me to be in it. To be honest I'm a bit scared about the possibilty of rejection in any case.
But if hearing that I've been thinking about them raises a smile and they just want to say hi and how they're doing, I'd like to have that chance. Now, how do I get this blog to come up in a google search...?