Unfortunately this never goes away

So I was talking to an old acquaintance, someone that I used to feel comfortable with, and the conversation didn't go as planned. The person seemed disinterested and distant in what I was saying. There was a time when this person was enthusiastic when we spoke. As the conversation dragged on I started to get they familiar horrible feeling in my stomach that I had lost another connection to the world - I no longer felt comfortable sharing intimate information with the person and it felt like our relationship had never occurred. How does this happen - we had a history but it was like the person had taken some sort of memory erasing drug and I was a stranger. I eventually I fell silent as I noticed the person was spending more time staring off into space than listening to my interrogation. Well we parted ways and I spent the rest of the afternoon with a gnawing feeling in my gut about how human relationships can just dissipate - like water evaporating or something. It's always been a horrible realization - especially since I don't have that many friends. Why is it that reality is so painful - time for a nap.

It's this the first time this happened with this particular friend, maybe they were having an off day and had stuff going on that was distracting them.

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They could have simply been distracted for reasons not related to you. Also, you mentioned they are an "old acquaintance", which implies you weren't ever friends to begin with and not even recently in touch regularly. I'd perhaps not read too much into it.

Why did distance form to begin with? That could give you a clue as to why things didn't go back to what previous level of comfort you wanted to have back instantly.

When you start to reconnect with someone, things very very rarely go instantly back to how they were. It's often like starting over with someone new, with the awkwardness of past memories and the knowledge of what caused the drift to begin with.

It sounds like this was how it was for your old aquaintance, yet you were pushing towards the level of friendship that is in the past? Which would increase the awkwardness most likely as your old aquaintance wouldn't be feeling that level of closeness and might not have known how to respond to it.

I'm ultra sensitive to these things. I guess it stems from always wanting things to be exactly as they should be. The problem is it always chews away at me to the point of paralysis because I just want it to be the way it was - and I know this isn't realistic but it doesn't seem to help. You know this person said some nice things to me in the past and I never really thanked them. I'm not good at getting close to people because of my own huge insecurities. I guess this is one of my greatest regrets is that I never achieved the amount of openness with people that I wanted - I've lost people because of this. I always felt different from most because I've always had my shield solidly up - this has made me a loner by default. Thanks.