Alone is what nobody wants to feel, but alone has never been an enemy. Alone has made men great yet a man always do not want to feel alone. Alone in the dark, great things spring up. Alone with my pen, I could only scratch out my best.
This is the thought of the heart. The thought that remains of what everyone had thought about. The thought that comes around when the world is near yet space is plenty.

Ever since I was ten, most of my tiny prayers right from our local Assemblies of God church were that the sad crimes and ordeal that happen to people never befall me. I wished for times of merry and togetherness. But, to think of it, am I not being lopsided? My mother cut me off; she said I was being too optimistic.

Then I was ten. Now, I am 20 laying happily on a bed measured to be my size in my hostel without enough clothes. It has been a normal custom for same sexes to feel comfortably nude in their hostels and also a normal activity for some hoodlums to make away with one’s takings whenever they deemed fit. In my little mind, I have come to irrationally conclude that the latter only happens in my school, in the University. An institution of tensions and strikes, welts and kisses, lions and mice and cuckoo birds that hatch in other birds’ nest and then push the other birds out violently. An institution where our teachers have become our debit cards. You won’t believe that most of our doors in school are without locks and we use buckets of water to at least make the door close. Believe it now!

Thieving boys were hard by during the day light or the dark night. Either way, I had acted smartly by returning early to my room. To me one can make loads of A studying in the room without going for night classes.

That night, I was reading a novel, upholding my joy that Port Harcourt my city had been enunciated as the World Book Capital and reading other books after lecture notes became a great solitary enjoyment that began to incubate a wealth of knowledge. I read few more pages and checked the time. It was 12:30am. I couldn’t stop reading but I had to for respite’s sake. So I closed the novel, neatly placed it by my side, said a short silent prayer and journeyed from slumber to sleep.

Few hours later…
What woke me was a hard blow on the door and I screamed at the top of my voice quickly reaching out to one of my roommates who was already trembling beside me. Everything was appearing so fast like 9D roller-coaster. Shocked was an understatement to what I was when it became clear to me that humans like us have broken into our room or put it better, they strolled into the room splashing the buckets of water that we used as locks. How ridiculous.
I do not know what to call them but they were bullies, male bullies and they bullied us till they got the last naira in our bags and fled for other rooms. I felt that sharp pain on my face when one of them descended on me to bring my own money wherever I kept it. I wholeheartedly demonstrated like a puppet unaware that I have just my panty on. Damn! The idiots saw my eve nature. Thomas Hobbes said that man was brutish and cruel during the early life but I bet he will suffer a dearth of words to describe the world now. I have read and heard stories of sadness that I never dreamt I would be a victim of. In the journey of life, what happens to others will start being a portion of yours someday.

When they fled for other rooms, I was not too surprised to see myself folding into three blankets at a time, I had become suddenly elastic. I refused to believe that they have already seen us naked. We kept hearing noise of plea from other rooms as all five of us squeezed ourselves into one bed. Ordinarily, my roommate Gift wouldn’t have allowed either of us to share her bed, but there she was doing it generously, her head was harbouring in my armpit.

Soon we heard some chatters and presumed they have left. You can imagine the screams from the girls, one of the things women are good at. We’ve been robbed. It doesn’t make any difference from other stories heard but that day was our first day to see them guns in the hands of robbers. The guns were black, ugly, strong and wickedly pointing at me, just me.

As the girls kept shouting out, ‘ help o, help, our phones, my money, our laptops’ guess where I was? You might want to laugh – I was still squeezed into the same position I had been with my eyes tightly shut. The firewood of this world is not for everybody and first experience can embarrass even a giant.

I felt nonchalant about whatever was taken before I gently opened my eyes and found myself alone. The room was in shambles. Buckets, books, bags, slips, panties, clothes, fans all torn apart. That my beautiful eyeglass was stolen too. How fast evil comes but refuses to quell. It should have been a dream at least in my dream; I would have grown wings and apprehended them all. Till now, it is very difficult to say that life is not a dream.

Source:
http://egbechofaith.com/friends-with-the-pen/