My first best friend was this kid named Tolin. He was a chubby little fellow. 
He went to my school and we were inseperable, kasme. I’d come home and tell my mom all about how Tolin got these new shiney shoes and how Tolin likes to eat raisans and how Tolin got a new haircut. Such things were very important to me. We told eachother all of our secrets - I even remember him telling me that he had a crush on his babysitter, kasme (her name was Linda and he pretended to hate her 
).
One time my mom made me a kabob sandwich for lunch. After it had been sitting in my lunchbox all morning, I went and sat at the lunch table with my friends and when I opened my lunch box, all the kids were like “Ewww what IS that?!”.
All except Tolin. 
He said it looked kinda good (everything looked good to him, kasme, he ate anything he laid his eyes on haha). So I gave him a piece of my soggy kabob sandwich and he really liked it. The next day I brought in two kabobs and we ate them together and he called them “meat logs” hahaha. 
We eventually drifted apart around the 5th grade. I began hanging with the “popular kids”. I went on to do so throughout middle school, and by then, we hardly talked to eachother. One day in the 8th grade I heard from someone that Tolin had moved to Georgia. I cried a lot later that day because it was too late to have even said goodbye. 
I realized how my stupid decision to boost my rep. cost me my best friend.
Hanging with the popular kids sucks. I did it last year and my life was hell…but hey, I was “cool”. Towards the beginning of this school year, I changed a lot. I learned that popular kids are actually the real losers (for putting so much effort into being ‘cool’)…I learned that pals should be measured quality over quantity…and I learned that being “popular” in highschool won’t matter the least to me when I get older and roll in the real world.
I miss Tolin and I wish he could read this.
. I’m a better Muslim now too. 
I’ll go crawl back into my hole now. 
I m so cool 
