Life Isn't Hard

What Went Wrong (10)

The day it would clock a month since Opeyemi came back home from school was the day she decided to pack her bags and leave for school.

The home which she once cherished so much now nauseated her to the core. She couldn’t withstand it any longer. She was tired of counting days that were always longer than 24 hours. She was tired of counting minutes that were longer than sixty seconds. There were days it would look as though she had slept for almost the whole of the day and when she woke up, the time that would have passed wouldn’t be up to two hours.

“How is this possible?” She had asked herself on one of those frustrating occasions. The only time she wasn't idle or bored was when she came out in the morning to do house chores. After that, her boredom episode would begin for that day.

Unlike when she was coming home that she was reminiscing on those experiences that have managed to carve her into something else, now in the bus on the way back to school, all she wanted to do was to ease herself of the burden of everything so she just tuned into Naira Marley’s song and grooved all the way.

She had just bought a new pair of bass ear pods a day before the journey and she had already fixed it in her ear from the beginning of the journey. Due to the whirling sound waves and the noise the bus was constituting, she decided to put the music on full volume to enjoy the rhythm of the song.

“Aye yi o le o, (Aye yi o le)

Aye lo m'aye le, (Aye lo m'aye le)

Ninu aye lo ti di f'aye, Aye lo m'aye le,

(Aye lo m'aye le).”

(This life isn’t hard,

We are the ones that make life hard,

In the world to come, life to the world,

This life isn’t hard.)

The raucous sound from Naira Marley’s voice didn’t stop Opeyemi from singing along in the bus. She sang so loud that it began to irritate the other passengers in the bus.

“We know their type. Na dem motor dey jam for road because dey don put earpiece for ear on top road.” One unkemptly dressed woman from the last row in the bus gossiped loudly to the other passengers in the bus.

Opeyemi didn’t even show any sign of caring about what they were saying. Although she couldn’t hear them due to the loud banging music in her ear, she knew they were discussing about her because she knew that she was singing loudly enough for a person with mini ear problems to hear her. All she cared about was the joy that was sprouting in her because she was going back to school.

“Life isn’t hard after all.” She thought as she tried to make sense of her newly found favorite Naira Marley’s song.

“We humans are the ones who make everything hard for ourselves.” She ended her thought on that note as she concluded that she wouldn’t make things hard for herself this semester. She promised to do whatever it took to never be the same way she was in the previous semester. She was willing to sacrifice whatever it required.

Dear reader, next week we converge here again for another scintillating episode. The day and time still remain the same; it’s always Mondays. Have you dropped a comment?