Gregor Ehrenwald never excelled at conversation but had a gift for suggestion. He curated his Facebook like a diplomat, or maybe a monastic scribe. His profile boasted clips of treacherous mountain bike trails. He didn’t own a mountain bike. He was waiting for the Epic 8’s price to drop. He shared quotes from Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He’d bought Being and Time and planned to read it soon. His Friends tab showed camaraderie of a luminous, unaccountable texture. These weren’t lies, but aspirations projected from the regard he recalled holding at Canyon Lake High School. Or would still hold, had he not been forced to work nights to secure the college education that took him out of circulation for five full years. Not lies exactly, more a species of autobiographical foreshadowing.

After several years of this mild deception, a shift occurred – not dramatically, but with the soft click of remembering a movie he never saw. Gregor began composing posts with a fluency that startled even him. “Great catching up with granite master Lars, still the sickest dude on the west face of Tahquitz” he typed one night, forgetting that he’d never climbed at Tahquitz and that there was no Lars. He had, admittedly, joined the climbing club his senior year. Yet the words fell into place as though Lars had laughed and belayed and borrowed a pedal wrench he never returned. These memories did not contradict Gregor’s recollection of his real high school years but simply inserted themselves beside them, as though time had gently forked.

Gregor posted late into the night, like he didn’t have a day job. He woke to the muscle memory of reaching for his phone. His fingers danced across the screen before his eyes could adjust to the light. He dabbled in Facebook politics briefly. The algorithm offered outrage and validation. He wanted something warmer, something that remembered him.

After work, Gregor passed the hallway mirror, caught his reflection, and paused – eyes bright, almost feverish, as if he’d just heard good news.

That night, in a storage bin untouched for years, he found his high school book covers – brown grocery bags, folded with care, still taped from Algebra, Latin, Geometry. Their surfaces were scrawled with pen and Sharpie, dense with notes and swirls coiling inward.

He traced a note from Luke Stone: “Hey Library Rat – kidding, man!” A hasty “Cool guy, great P.A.” from Charlotte Brooks, who had usually looked through him.  Then:

“G-money! Chemistry sucked without your jokes. Stay wild!”

“You leave a little sparkle wherever you go. Work hard and stay humble!”

There were a dozen book covers, each packed with tributes. Some comments ran in overlapping curls. Others were squeezed so narrow they had to be read with the flashlight.

He spotted this from Lauren D:

“To bestie GE – Voted Most Original Sense of Humor!!!”

And from Justin:

“Never forget that time we killed the Elsinore talent show. Wild sax!”

The names rang hollow. He didn’t remember a talent show.

He studied the doodles. Simple, repetitive shapes – coiling glyphs, chains, filigree. Clumsy figures too, but insistent: cats with mohawks, clown faces, spirals to nowhere. Probably mid-lecture boredom. Or maybe not.

 On the last cover, he noticed, near the bottom, beneath a tiny saxophone outline, penned in a measured, angular hand:

“Believe in yourself as much as I believe in you! Facebook FTW!”

Facebook?

Gregor froze. He set the cover down carefully. The room leaned in, heavy with heat.

A prank, he thought at first. Someone messing with him, writing on his stuff. But no. He wondered if he’d suffered some obscure brain fever – the kind that haunt old novels, now rebranded as mild dissociative episodes.

The handwriting mimicked styles he admired: elongated Gs and Spencerian script, grand loops with a practiced flair. Some mirrored his own hand. Others from hands he’d never seen. It was as though the entries had written themselves to flatter him in the light he wished to be seen in.

Facebook – that was the breach – the hinges on which the door now swung. No Facebook back then. Nor had there been Lars. And yet: how warm the perceived laughter, how victorious up on Tahquitz, how easy the belonging.

Then he recalled a neuroscience article Lars had shared. Memories could misfire, it said, landing in the wrong slot.

He sat on the edge of the bed and devised his own Theory of Premature Memory Displacement.

Certain memories, he reasoned, do not originate in the past but arrive early, dressed in nostalgia. The mind, trying to orient them temporally, may misfile them. The Facebook entries were always meant for him – but like mail delivered to a former address, had arrived a decade late. A memory lost doesn’t vanish, it ricochets around the mind until it lands on some vacant shelf, to be recovered later.

Satisfied, he opened the last cover – the part that once faced the book’s actual cover. There he found a girl’s message:

“Never stop writing, Gregor. You see things others miss.”

He underlined her name. Trina – and then, as if prompted, recalled her fabulous voice, her rendition of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. He refolded the covers and put them back in the bin.

He thumbed through Heidegger, hunting for a line to post. There it was – page 374:

“The ‘past’ – or better, the having-been – has its being in the future.”

The likes came in slow but steady.

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