My name is Aaron Tribiani and I’m not at all interested in history. I live in Europe and the city I live in is connected with the sea. I like spending time by the sea but right now I’m on the sea in some boat. I am headed to Octaland.

Let me start from the beginning. My family appeared to be a really peaceful family but it wasn’t. We had quite a violent history. My uncles were very aggressive men and my grand fathers were probably murderers. But I never really cared. I liked to move on and think ahead. I liked to plan what’s coming ahead of me. But my family didn’t really let me. It was their past that kept pulling me backwards. It was times like these when I regretted being a part of Tribiani family.

There are some important characters of my story that you must know. I’m going to brief them for you. Shawn Tribiani is my father, he is a peaceful person but he has no tolerance when it comes to our family rivalries. Two characters in this story are Gabriel Tribiani. One of them is my volatile brother who was named after our special ancestor Gabriel Tribiani. My mother Alison is a good woman, completely separate from all the disputes. Lindsay Martinez is my wife who is a sweet spoken person. Tom Collins is my close friend whom I would like to describe in just one word as ‘Unpredicatable’. And Ralph Tribiani is my father’s younger brother with excellent debating skills.

But besides my family, there is a rival family who considers Hector to be their greatest ancestor of all time. Vernon Leaf is their infamous speaker who has perhaps greatest speech delivering skills. But nobody really likes him because of his other bad habits. Lindsey’s father is Mr. Mark Martniez, the person you don’t want to sit next to. And lastly, Lot Hector is their honest yet aggressive debater who cannot be easily defeated. Now there is a religious scholar Samson Buttons, who influenced me the most but a brief introduction for him is not enough. I’ll introduce him later.

Now two special personalities Gabriel and Hector are hanging. And they haven’t been introduced properly. Gabriel Tribiani was my grandfather’s grandfather and Hector was our rival family’s ancestor of the same time as Gabriel. My story’s objective was to discover who was the hero and who was the villain of the event that took place in Octaland.

2001

My name is Aaron Tribiani and I don’t like history at all. I was seven years old and I was here at some library with my father and my elder brother. I remember that there was an empty space in the middle and we all were seated in that empty space. Who were we all?

We were around twenty men. It was meant to be a verbal and peaceful debate between the two families. On the wall, there was some poster that stated:

Debate Topic: Who was on the path of Righteousness?

Hector or Gabriel

I was so young by then that I had really no idea about what was going on. My father and I were seated at the last row. My elder brother however, was seated on the front row close to the debater of our side Mr Clint Tribiani who was a distant relative.

On the opposite side, there were ten members like us and I didn’t really know their debater’s name.

I was however very irritated as it was feeling really hot. The debate had begun and I was constantly asking my dad:

“When are we going to leave?”

My twenty year old brother was listening to the debate quite impatiently. Mr Clint was holding some books and he was reading them out on the mic that was placed in front of him.

The opposite party was constantly interrupting him making our relatives angry about it. It was overall a really long debate. I remember that I slept for half an hour in the middle.

The last moment of the debate that I remember was that some guy from the opposite family had stood up and he was reading out some book quite loudly like a manner less person. He gave this statement:

“Gabriel was a disgraceful thief!”

I was looking around until I saw some guy of our team holding a black rock and looking at the opposite team with evil intentions.

After a moment, the guy who was reading out a loud got hit by the black rock on his chest. This aggravated the debate and members of opposite team started using bad words and so did members of our family. My father kept his both hands on my ears and we prepared to leave.

Days later, my father was sitting quite upset in his room. He was talking to my mother and it appeared that he was really upset about what happened at the debate.

An hour later that day, he came to me and said:

“My son… There’s something I need to talk to you about…”

“Okay,” I replied while I was playing with my toys.

“What happened the other day in the library is not your concern. Do you understand that? You are not going to become a violent person. You have to understand that peace unites the world and violence breaks us apart.”

“Okay…”

“And son… You also have to forget what you saw and what you heard that day in the library.”

“Oh, okay!”

“Good!”

“Hey Dad,” I spoke after a while. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure!”

“Who was Gabriel?”

“Gabriel my son was a great man. He was an honest and selfless person who sacrificed his own life to save others.”

“Was my brother named after him?”

“Yes, yes, he definitely was. But your name is also very nice and important.”

“Oh, okay…”

He kept his hand on my shoulder, tapped a bit, and then left the room.

•

That same year during December, I remember I was playing basketball with my friends. We were like six boys and we were at the small basketball court below our apartments. Two boys were new as they had just moved and settled here in our building.

I remember while we were playing, my elder brother Gabriel Tribiani came inside the basketball court and he said looking at one of the new boys:

“You! Come here…”

That young boy fearfully went towards him and uttered:

“Yes!”

My brother looked down at him quite sternly and asked:

“Where are you from?”

That kid mentioned some city I can’t seem to remember. My brother then asked some questions regarding ‘Hector’. The young kid answered all those questions quite fearfully. However, Gabriel got what he wanted to know and he asked that little boy to leave the basketball court immediately. As we all were looking, my brother turned towards us and gave his final verdict:

“From now onwards, I do not want to see this kid inside this basketball court! Is that understood?”

We all nodded getting frightened by his tone. Afterwards, my brother left the place and even though we were shocked we thought that it was over, but it wasn’t.

Half an hour later, two tall heighted guys who seemed older than Gabriel came inside the court while we were playing. That young little kid was also with them. I was called by them and one of them said:

“Go and call your brother…”

I did as they asked me to. Within few minutes, I came back to the basketball court with my elder brother. The adults furiously came closer towards my brother and said:

“Who the hell do you think you are? Talk to us now!”

My brother was completely fearless and asked them to calm down. I was so frightened that I don’t even remember their actual conversation. All I remember was that they were quarrelling over what my brother said to their nephew and also that they were discussing about their family dispute. This I know for sure that they were from Hector family which was meant to be our rival family.

But what happened further traumatised me forever. Both the adults started beating up my brother. It was a brutal fight, two against one. I closed my eyes and started crying as I saw my brother’s forehead bleeding.

Something dropped from the adults’ pocket. It was a little piece of paper. No one really saw it.

The next morning, I came to that court. It was totally vacant. I walked inside and remembered what happened the day before and couldn’t help getting over it. My brother was in the hospital and I was a bit guilty of bringing him on the command of those two adults.

Anyways, I happened to pass by that little note that dropped the day before. I picked it up and read it out. It was like a list mentioned with five bullet points,

1 No family is allowed to murder any member of the opposite family.

2 Involving cops into disputes is not allowed.

3 Winning is only through debates and verbal arguments.

4 Women must not be involved in any sort of fights.

5 Books and pictures are the only evidences acceptable.

I was quite confused as to what I had found as I had no idea what these points were. However, I had no clue that these five points were the five pillars on which our family disputes existed. If it weren’t for these, our disputes would have been resolved a lot sooner.

2018

My name is Aaron Tribiani, and history does not matter to me a bit. I was twenty four years old and I was really upset today, since I had a severe breakup. My girl friend with whom I spent more than two years had kind of dumped me and I was badly depressed. To be really honest, I wanted some car crash or some natural disaster to destroy me as life was literally unbearable. But it wasn’t happening.

So, I started spending some time at my family meetings where I could easily distract myself.

One night, I went to my Uncle Ralph Tribiani’s house as I knew that he was going to deliver a speech and almost everyone from the family was going to come and hear his speech. My father and my brother were however out of town which was why they couldn’t be a part of this occasion.

Ralph Tribiani was standing by the wooden rostrum while delivering his speech and I was sitting with other relatives on the chairs.

“Gabriel was a man of moral values!” he stated. “He was so honest with himself and with others that he never went against his own rules.”

I looked towards my left and towards my right. I saw that people were so deeply involved in his speech that they were listening to each and every sentence very carefully.

“Gabriel could have survived. He could have lived a few more years. In fact, many more years. But since he was a man of ethics, which was why he preferred rather dying at the hands of the cruel landlord Hector. Hector had no character. He had no soul, which was why he killed him so cruelly. But what did he get? He got cursed forever and Gabriel got blessed forever.”

Everyone started clapping on this sentence. I was looking at them all and was thinking what kind of people they were, who were still interested in more than hundred years old history.

This gathering was in my family’s honour but I unfortunately, had no respect for it. I wasn’t really bothered about who Gabriel was or what the role of Hector was. My opinion was that history does not really matter as long as it does not manipulate our future. But I was wrong. It was this decades old history that had been manipulating our family’s thoughts and actions. And because of this we never succeeded in education or other worldly affairs.

Few nights later, I was sitting all by myself at the restaurant where I used to come with my ex-girlfriend. The truth is that I was giving myself all this pain. And for no reason at all. What I really wanted was that I wanted to be in a committed relationship with some girl. A girl of my age. And that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

You know breakups can be really hard. The worst thought that comes to your mind is that what if you could undo the day you fell in love with your partner.

I’ve been thinking that I’m going through the worst phase of my life but I was wrong. The actual worst time of my life was yet to come and it wasn’t really that far.