Books with unreliable narrators like “Gone Girl”, “The Girl One the Train”, and other suspenseful delights keep coming across my “laptop desk” in the form of emails. I suspect this sub-genre will continue to grow due to dictating sales.

I discovered my own unreliable narrator. My mind.

It has been 40 years since high school and while a number of us have a Facebook page, many of us do not. My mind has been scrambling to remember which ones of my friends in my youth went to which high school.

There were two public high schools and two Catholic that kids had a choice of going to. The Catholic schools were separated by gender and miles.

Holy Child Catholic School for Girls, was located in town, but closed my junior year. I went there my freshman year, a treasured time indeed. Some on my friends crammed to graduate that year – to be able claim to a true and blue Holy Child girl in their hearts and on their diplomas. Carmel Catholic High School was 14 miles away in Mundelein and accepted both genders. Many of my grade school friends went there, mostly the boys.

The public high schools were divided by the map and called East and West.

In these past couple weeks of trying to narrow down the dates of our 40th reunion, I have been trying to remember who went where.

Yesterday, I hit the intimate low.

Me on FB: Julie, did you graduate from East with me in “77?

Julie on FB: Yeah, we had lunch together with Ellen.

Me in my head: Who’s Ellen?

I did eventually remember Ellen but there was a flutter of brain matter in the wind as I tried to regather the loose pieces of memories that fell from my gray matter like an overturned trash can.

Have I, in the course of writing and imaging, lost my long term memory? Or is it just other memories stronger than others? Perhaps i just need more people like Julie to remind of people like Ellen and why I miss her.