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During Sophomore year in university, my best friend and I got into a fight.

The animosity was difficult to maintain because we couldn’t really avoid each other. We were both in the same major and had most of our classes together.

But we were kids, and we were determined to do everything possible to keep the bitterness alive.

We would walk into class without speaking to each other, keeping dry eye contact just to make sure the other knew how deliberate the act was. We would sit as far apart as possible and ignore each other.

This lasted for a few weeks.

But a few weeks later, I tried to remember what we had argued about in the first place. I literally could not remember what started the fight.

That morning, in class, I walked up to my friend and said, “I tried to remember what we argued about, but I couldn’t remember it. And unless you can remind me, I don’t see any reason for us to continue to be in a fight.” Then I added, “If it was my fault, please accept my apology.”

I set my bag next to him and sat down., life went back to normal.

The moral of the story is:

After graduation, this guy left the country and never looked back. Our friendship dissolved with the distance.

Be careful not to waste your apologies on those who don’t deserve it, even if it sounds poetic or sentimental at the time.

No visit to my aunt’s house would be complete without a giant tub of popcorn being served. She knew my love for popcorn, and she loved to spoil me.

My cousins and I would gather around the wooden dining table in the spacious kitchen and, handful after handful, we would race to the bottom of the bowl. I had the advantage of being the eldest, but also not chewing too much, so I was ahead of everyone.

To my right sits the youngest of the cousins, Ahmad, only three years old at the time. He would go at the popcorn at his own pace, not interested in the pressure of the race.

Once in a while, I would pick up a soggy piece of popcorn and it would disgust me to the point where I would lose my appetite. “Why did you chew it and put it back?” I would ask Ahmad. He would deny it, every time. This happened a lot.

Almost every visit; every tub of popcorn. My guess was that he would take one and, finding it too chewy or maybe not salty enough, would just put it back, soggy.

Fast forward 10 years.

I’ve moved out of Lebanon. I’m living on my own and could have as much popcorn as I want. So, I bought a pot and some popcorn and started figuring out the best way to make it. I hate the microwave kind.

Long story short, it turns out that popping popcorn in a pot produces a lot of steam., the steam collects on the underside of the lid and then, as the drops get larger, starts to fall onto the popcorn. Like a small water cycle of sorts.

The end result: The occasional soggy piece of popcorn.

I’m sorry Ahmad.

My father used a perfume called Fahrenheit, from Christian Dior. It had a very warm, spicy scent to it. He would spray it specifically exactly right before he stepped out of the house for work in the morning.

When I was maybe four or five, my father bought me a set of video tapes of The Smurfs, the Arabic version. I was hooked immediately.

The set had seven tapes, and my father said I can open a new one every day. So, every morning I would wake up super early, excited to watch Al Sanafer.

But I had one obstacle. My father.

He would be annoyed that I was up so early. He expected me to contain my excitement and sleep in a little longer.

And so, every morning when I woke up quivering with Smurficious anticipation, I had to pretend I was still asleep until he left.

Lying down in my bed, I had only one cue that my father was about to leave.

The smell of Fahrenheit wafting slowly to my bed through the corridor. As soon as I smelled it, I knew he was out, and I could get up and watch my cartoons!

To this day, the smell of Fahrenheit perfume, which is very uncommon, sends me back to that moment and fills me with happiness.

Not just any happiness. The happiness of no longer having to pretend to be asleep, and the freedom to be a careless child watching and re-watching his favorite cartoon with no limitations.

When I was 15, I asked my father to get me a new, “cool” backpack for school.in my mind I expected a Jansport or an Eastpak bag, like the other cool kids in class.

My father, a practical man, had a different idea.

A few days later I returned from school to find my new backpack waiting for me in my room, this monstrosity was rectangular in shape, made of hard material, and had enough pockets to pack all my belongings. It was ugly, it was angular, and it was the farthest from cool a backpack can be.

Oh, and it was black and lilac in color.

For the next month, I would arrive early to school, run to the classroom and place my backpack under my desk so I wouldn’t have to be seen walking in with it. I kept a safe distance between me and my bag, and I hid it under my shirt on my way out of school.

One day, the backpack was sitting at the back of the class and I was in the front. A classmate saw it and made fun of it. “Whose stupid bag is this?”

Oh man, the moment of reckoning was upon me.

“It’s mine,” replied Tarek, my best friend. The kids made fun of the bag; he laughed with them and totally owned it with a smile.

And that was the earliest act of kindness I could recall receiving.

At the end of Grade 9, my family relocated from Riyadh to Amman. This would be the first time in years that I would be back into a mixed school. I had been in an all-boys school for the past six years.

I was 14 years old at the time, so this relocation, unfortunately for me, coincided with my hormones firing up.

After a few weeks of settling into Grade 10, I wanted so badly to know what it feels like to have a girlfriend that I went about systematically asking out every single girl in class.

I started with the one I thought was the most attractive, and, rejection after rejection, worked my way down the list.

But…

I didn’t walk up to the girls and ask them out. Nope. That would be the normal thing to do. Instead, I wrote them love letters.

Long story short, after writing letters (no copy-paste, all personalized, all rejected) to every single girl in Grade 10A, B, C, and D, and then attempting Grade 9s as well, I didn’t get a girlfriend.

But I got really good at writing love letters!

“We have to stay quiet now,” my grandfather said, switching off the light of the living room. Israeli jet planes were flying menacingly low over Beirut that night.

In the room were my maternal grandparents, my aunt, mother, my three-year-old sister and myself, aged five. We had all gathered on the floor in the center of the pitch-black house, a safe spot farthest from the windows.

We sat in a circle, holding our breaths, but I couldn’t keep still. Harder yet was to remain quiet. I had many questions and didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation.

My grandfather, the only man in the house that day, ordered me firmly to be quiet but I couldn’t abide. I kept talking and he, probably nervous and afraid for our lives, slapped me on the face. It worked.

This memory, still as clear as the day it happened, has been with me since then. I always wondered why my mother let it happen. Why she didn’t stand up to him or at least comfort me.

A few years back, in casual conversation, I asked her about it. I recalled the entire situation, but she couldn’t remember it. I gave her every detail.

“Your grandfather never visited us in that house,” she said. “Your grandfather was out of the country by then.” I then searched online and all records of Israeli air raids that year show that they happened in the daytime.

Wow. This lucid, detailed, and emotionally charged memory of mine was not true. Most probably it was a dream or something.

I learned that I must question everything.