At 12, i made my closest friend ever in our maid called Mariam. I was home for the the third term vacation all thin and gangly, happy to be home from the school cum slavecamp and there she was. Mariam was as weird as she was beautiful. Boy! did she have a lot of tales to tell. She told me of her dead twin to whom she talked to on a daily basis.That got me,I'm a scarredy cat!
We'd be gisting and suddenly she'd say something like.'Do you know Taiwo is sitting here right now?' i'd freeze and go running like my pant's on fire.The wicked girl would just laugh. 'she won't hurt you.'. One day, we had a terrible fight and i made her cry[i was a precocious child] i should have been satisfied but that night i couldn't sleep. Some hours to my bed time, the 'were' girl was holding a monologue on how 'some people' were in so much trouble they wouldn't get any sleep at all. I was so scared of the ghost that i swallowed my pride and had to apologise. She said i was lucky i did, because her twin had been planning to visit me that night.'AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH' I spent about an hour apologising to the girl and the invisible twin. And though i liked her, i was not sorry to see her leave after a one year stay. It gave me a life decision. I would never employ a stay at home maid.
Mariam was the first to give me a lecture on hell, she'd speak of judgement day and tell me of visions of hell her twin sister saw daily. I remember her speak of tongues nailed to trees, snakes and scorpions amidst fires burning ceaselessly.Even my Alfa was not as vivid as Mariam was, though i guess she'd have made all the children cry. I used to be so scared of death, what would happen if this life was snuffed? would i be as stone or sand or just hovering, still conscious yet not dead. It took years of learning and a simple sentence to cure me 'You shouldn't be scared of death, fear hell whose fuel is men and stones.'
I used to wonder on atheism. Could all this be by chance, or nature. That we believe only in what we can see. Then i started dissections in anatomy, saw the intricate design of muscles of the hand, the convolutions called gyri of the brain, the fist shaped centre called the heart supplying blood in a closed system And i knew no man could have engineered this on his own let alone 'nature or chance' just words with no life. As each person, no matter how worthless had that carefully deliberated touch, different and uniquely proportioned. There is a God.I got into science out of rebellion. My entire family is into the law and arts so everyone assumed i'd go into law. i so enjoyed that surprised look on my father's face when i said I'd do medicine. I had this vision in my head of the kind of hot doctor i'd be. Me, tall, leggy, short skirt, high heels, long hair, ward coat carelessly slung over my shoulder. None of it will ever come to be. I discovered the clinical years filled with stringent rules. You may not wear pants, paint your nails or dorn too short a skirt. Ward coat white, with your name tags and no flashy hairstyles. The only time i get to be a hot doctor is on the weekends and without the coat, nobody knows or cares i'm a doctor.
I always imagined my uni life would be one great party, someone should have warned me before i filled in that form.
Most of the time i'm happy with my life.I used to wonder on happiness and was an integral part of the throng that dwelled on the sentence.'i'd be happy when...' That didn't work out for me, i'd get all the things i want, still happiness would elude me. Then i discovered that only 'me' makes me happy and if i was determined to be miserable, i would be. I started seeing things to be thankful for and less to complain about and found out He really cares. God really cares!
