My great aunt always tells me to follow the cigarette butts home. You can count more of them on the streets than stars in the sky. Her laugh scrapes across the hot coals of her hookah pipe. Through the open window, the smell of Lebanon’s pollution battles with the date-infused tobacco oil my family inhales like oxygen, a tug-of-war in which my nose is the only loser. There’s a soccer game at which my uncles are shouting, a sitting room that has grown used to the noise, and a smile on my face that’s filled with love.

I remember the first time my cousin told me to check for a car bomb. It was June of 2006. I remember the sting of my knees on the boiling concrete as I peered underneath Sulaima’s garish red punch buggy. People seemed skittish, that summer. I could tell because my Amto Layla’s eyes didn’t dance with the secrets of the universe. We didn’t go grape-picking in the valleys. My dad cut our trip short and flew us back before June had ended. I learned years later that the streets had cracked open with guns and tanks two weeks after we left. My relatives call it the July War. The next time we returned, the buildings were riddled with bullet holes.

You learn on the way out of Beirut International Airport that traffic laws are optional. Lanes diverge and shift depending on the willpower and anger of the drivers. There are rolled down windows and curled fists and creative strings of Arabic accusing mothers of being donkeys and spouses of being promiscuous. In the chaos, everything seems electric, bold and unapologetic in a way I wish I could be.

When I was thirteen, we spent the summer in the mountains. We stopped the car when we had finally risen above the layer of smog that the country wore like a second skin. At night, my siblings chased chickens with our cousins as I stood at the edge of the world. My dad took my hand and urged me to look up at a sky white with stars, black specks barely visible. “Habibti, darling, look what’s been hiding from us,” he said softly. We gave them names. “That one’s Amo Sami,” I pointed out. “He’s the biggest one.” My dad laughed, and I remember I thought that if people were stars, then my family was a constellation. A wild circus of heroic hearts, beating fiercely, following the roadmaps back to each other through war and poverty and everything in between, vibrant and alive and warmer than the mountain air.

The first time someone called me a terrorist, I was in seventh grade. Even if the mandatory icebreaker in English class hadn’t introduced my heritage to my peers, even without my German side shaping most of my face, my nose was a dead giveaway. It’s my father’s. I never liked the boy, but he seemed harmless until 2014 brought violence and bloodshed and the first public mention of ISIS. He was afraid; I forgive him. We read the same headlines. Except he had never seen the grottos of Jeita when the cavelight hits the stalactites just right and steals the words from your chest. He had never played tag in the ruins of Byblos, run quick and breathless around castles and columns carved in an ancient world. He had never stood on the cliffs and watched the Mediterranean flow powerfully below, let Lebanon’s human noise fill his soul.

I knew I was the lucky one.