Once, in a distant past, you knew someone, maybe you spent a lot of time together, maybe you only knew each other barely, maybe you were good friends, or maybe you only had business relations and didn't have much to say about each other. You knew each other, but eventually the paths separated, the contact died a natural death, or something happened that broke the thread of communication. It doesn't matter. It's been months, years, anything has stopped connecting you until finally boom! A third party mentioned something, your name was told out loud and suddenly you became someone's friend again, even though the real acquaintanceship has long become very blurred.
The passage of time, personal progress, new stage, new chapter, new life, new you. You don't look back because you have become the best version of yourself so far and you strive to be someone even better than you are now. You are happy with what you managed to achieve, what transformation (which you may have always dreamed of) you went through, you feel great about how far you have already gone and how close you are to the desired goal of your hard work.
You live your fresh, brand new life and then... They appear. Old friends with whom you haven't had any direct or indirect touch for years, maybe two, maybe five or maybe ten years. A reliable time machine you can always count on. Memories, old stories, funny anecdotes, sometimes it's nice to come back to the memories of what had happened a long time ago. Sometimes you can smile, reviving the heart-warming moments that have passed over time. However, it's not always so light and pleasant.
Many people, talking about someone with whom touch has been lost many years ago, think that they know them, whereas in the meantime this man could change beyond recognition in just a few months, not to mention years, what automatically makes them completely different than someone they remember. It's even possible that someone completely stranger. And it's not about appearance, just in case you didn't understand correctly. In reality, however, it's more like summoning ghosts and living the visions of the past than knowing an alive man whose life didn't stop at the time when the paths with people from old times went apart and all connections got blurred. Many people like these don't realize that discussing who someone is, not who they were (which is a huge difference), is simply not proper anymore. Especially it is not proper to do it behind their back. Because how can you know who a person is currently, what has changed in them, how they arranged their lives, how their character was shaped, what they experienced if you had no touch with them? Just use a bit of logic to understand that in real it's basically impossible. Many people are not aware of the fact that the version of the exact person, which stuck in their memories from years ago, may not exist long ago, and about the new one, they have no idea.
I have passed through this bumpy road hundreds of times myself, when old colleagues hit the reality and realized that they didn't really know me anymore, because the person who lived in their memory has long stopped to be that person in life and became someone who is far from their old ideas and assumptions.
Don't do this, don't say who someone is until you are sure you know who they really are. Just because you knew someone in the past doesn't mean that you know them now.
