A few years ago, I reconnected with one of my closest friends from high school. We were close enough that her family knew me well, and I was even part of her cotillion when she turned eighteen.

Our catching up started the way conversations between old friends usually do. We talked about people, places, and random stories from high school, and she kept laughing at how much I still remembered. Then she asked me something that caught me off guard.

What happened between her and two of our common friends?

She knew they had been her friends, but somehow, she couldn't remember much about them or why they were no longer close. So, I told her about the falling-out they had during our last year of high school.

She seemed genuinely surprised, almost as though I were telling her someone else's story.

Eventually, she made a group chat with me and another friend, CJ, and asked him the same question. His recollection matched mine. As we continued talking, CJ and I brought up other memories, and again and again, she couldn't remember them.

She didn't even remember that she had her appendix removed while we were still in high school, or that I used to carry her bag for her while she was recovering. I mean, she sees the scar, but she doesn't remember when it happened. What she kept saying was that, her memories from college were vivid, but high school was mostly blank.

And there was something else about our final year that CJ and I remembered very clearly.

She was bullied. Badly.

The reason, looking back now, seems ridiculously small compared with the damage people were willing to cause over it: someone's ex-boyfriend pursued her. That was apparently enough for other teenagers to make her life miserable.

Years later, there I was telling her stories about her own life that I remembered better than she did.

At some point, I became curious enough to ask someone I know who works in a mental health facility what could cause a person to lose memories of an entire period of her life. One possibility she mentioned was something called dissociative amnesia.

To be clear, my friend was never formally diagnosed with it, and I'm certainly not diagnosing her now. There are other reasons people can experience memory loss, and dissociative amnesia itself requires proper evaluation. But learning about it gave me something to think about.

Dissociative amnesia involves being unable to recall important personal memories, often associated with severe stress or trauma. Sometimes the missing memories involve a particular event. Sometimes they involve an entire period of someone's life. And people may not always realize how much they've forgotten until something brings their attention to those gaps.

I don't know if that's what happened to my friend. But suddenly, the possibility that someone's mind could distance itself from memories that had become too painful made those conversations with her feel different.

I also started wondering whether I did the right thing by answering all her questions. Maybe there was a reason those memories had faded. Maybe forgetting had helped her move forward, and there I was opening a door that had been closed for years.

But she asked.

Later, she apologized for not reaching out sooner. She told me that whatever feeling had made her distant from those two old friends, she had somehow felt toward me too, even though she couldn't remember why. She thanked me as well for staying. And, I think that made me feel a little better about having answered her questions.

Still, I've thought about that conversation differently as I've gotten older.

I was fortunate enough not to experience bullying the way she did. Of course there were days when I hated school, friendships that hurt, and moments I would've happily erased from my teenage years. But I got to leave high school carrying mostly memories.

Apparently, not everyone gets to leave that way.

We talk about bullying as though it belongs to childhood because that's usually when it happens. We tell kids to ignore it, toughen up, report it, stay away from or stand against the bully, or simply wait because eventually they graduate and it will all be over.

But graduating doesn't necessarily mean what happened disappears with the uniform.

Sometimes people carry those years with them long after they've left the classroom. It can affect how they see themselves, how they trust people, and perhaps even how they remember a period of their lives that everyone else gets to look back on with nostalgia.

That's something I understand much better now, especially whenever another story about bullying or school violence appears in the news. Adults see an incident that happened in school. For the child living through it, we have no idea how long that incident might last.

Maybe that's why I'm less comfortable now when people dismiss cruelty between children as "normal teenage drama." Not every disagreement is bullying, of course, and kids will have conflicts. But when cruelty becomes repeated, deliberate, and isolating, we shouldn't assume they'll simply grow out of what it did to them.

Sometimes I still wonder whether I should be glad that I helped my friend remember pieces of high school. I don't know. But I'm glad she asked and that I was still there to answer.

Maybe friendship isn't always about remembering the same things together. Sometimes it's also being able to say, years later, "I remember that part of you. I was there."

And perhaps when someone has lost pieces of a chapter they once shared with us, there is something comforting in knowing that somebody else still remembers.