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I can’t really explain why I remember some people but not others. On the eve of Ramadan last year, I wrote to one such individual. We were never friends; if anything, the complete reverse. Still, through all the years that followed, I never forgot their name.

Those old days had been on my mind a lot recently, I told them, as I sought to invite them to join my family for iftar one evening during the month of fasting. I knew my invitation was unlikely to be accepted, if they ever received it at all, but it was nevertheless sincere.

“I feel I need to apologise for some things that happened in those days,” I wrote, all of it still fresh in my mind despite the passage of decades. Yes, I wanted to make amends for conflict and bad opinions I once held of them and their companions, I said.

But of course the recipient was completely perplexed. When we later spoke on the phone, they couldn’t remember any conflict at all, nor could they place me. They ran off a list of everyone they could remember — all of them names I too recalled, precisely because of an animosity that effected me so profoundly — but no, they didn’t remember me.

I had to explain that we were not friends at all. Rather, I was one held in absolute contempt. At least, that’s how I remember it, the epithet I was given lodged firmly in the recesses of my mind. Every day at college seemed like conflict for me.

It was my fault, in many ways, as I misunderstood interactions, weighed down as I was by a pervasive anxiety and heavy melancholy that had lasted years. My fault too for allowing another to speak on my behalf, without ever really knowing what words cascaded from his lips. My fault for not restraining my own gaze. My fault, mostly, for believing my eyes and disbelieving my ears.

In the years since leaving college, I forgot the names of all I brushed shoulders with except five friends and those individuals. Of the friends, I remain in contact with only two. The one I called my best mate I lost all contact with. Another, I found myself sitting next to in a mosque one day, five years after he swore never to speak to me again.

Others whom I spent time with for a while, I only vaguely remember. But a group of people I never once spoke to directly, except to sponsor them for charity: they somehow left an indelible impression on my soul, which has never left me. In truth, I held a bad opinion of most of them for more years than I care to remember.

A year ago, I made contact with two from those days, nearly a month apart. The first of them I wrote to completely spontaneously, moments after seeing their face for the first time in over a quarter of a century. The second after weeks of inner turmoil. Neither remembered me, of course, nor what I spoke of. I suspect that would be true for all.

That I was so easily forgotten doesn’t bother me, for I have always been rather a recluse, taken to wandering alone. That I remember these folk but not others, though: perhaps there’s a blessing in that. These days I regularly remember them in my prayers, asking that they be bestowed with all the good things they desire. Indeed I tend to ask on their behalf more than I ask for myself or my family.

Why? Because I can only think there must have been a good reason that I was never able to forget them. And, in the end, it turns out that our paths crossed through the years, unbeknownst to any of us. If that isn’t a sign of fortuity, I don’t know what is. May God have mercy on those accidental companions of mine, never friends but kindred spirits. May the One rectify for them all of their affairs, just as He rectified all of mine.