What are the things you daydream about? What do you daydream about most of the time? I was just talking to someone about this earlier in the week. They caught me daydreaming, and asked what I was thinking about.

I was running through some old high school memories.

My 20-year high school reunion is next year, but that’s not why I was thinking about high school. I realized, the more I thought about it, that high school memories have always been my go-to daydreams, ever since I moved across the country for college. I remember daydreaming in college classes about things that happened in high school. All through my 20s and 30s, no matter what happened to me and what new memories I had, when I had time to daydream, I pulled out the high school memories.

And not a lot of them either. There’s like a dozen of them that I replay over and over in my mind.

You’d think I’d mentally revisit my wedding day or the birth of my children or my first day teaching or something like that. But no. I pull out the mental file of that time in 1995 when I was watching my crush play basketball, and she came up to say hello to me in the stands after the game. Or the time in marching band when I fell backward on the practice field and the bell of my sousaphone hit the person behind me. Or the time I was giving my friend Chris a ride to school, and we stopped for breakfast, and they got his order wrong, and he went crazy and started swearing over it. Or the time Heather and I skipped school and spent the day hanging out in a local cemetery because it was quiet and we knew no one would find us there.

I had a roommate in college. I lived with him for a year, and I cannot remember his last name. I can’t remember what he looked like. I spent five years as a retail manager. I had several employees who were with me the whole time. I worked with them on a daily basis in my 20s. I can’t remember their names now.

But I can remember clearly how some of my classmates from high school looked — people I never spoke to and only sat near in class for an hour a day. I remember their names. I remember all five Jennifers and all of the boys they dated between them, even though I rarely spoke to any of them. I remember the time my newspaper teacher asked if I wanted to be the co-editor of the newspaper with one of my friends. I remember the way the metal bleachers of the football stadium felt when you sat on them on a cool autumn night to watch the football game.

But I can’t remember the names of all of the students that I taught just last year.

For whatever reason, my mind has placed high school classmates in “priority information not to be forgotten”, while people I lived with and worked with and my alumni got their mental files dropped into the recycling bin.