Last year at Saint Patrick's

The fault in Philip's juke box

You found yourself in St Patrick's one day, a junior student who was insignificant and a back bencher. Some thought you to be slow but you thought that you just had to be that way if you wanted to observe the people around you closely. You were known to be the boy who fantasized about buns and puff-puff growing on trees and it made your class mates see you to be a bigger fool than you already looked. 
Popularity didn't reach you until the fourth year of secondary school, puberty did a wonderful job for you and everyone noticed it.

You became one of the big boys, a spec, smart in one or two science subjects and it drew you all the attention you were deprived of at the time your school trousers were short.
You remained a back bencher even in SS1 but you weren't slow anymore as it was known that the tortoise eventually wins the race. There were things some people couldn't boast of that you were already exposed to—social media at an early age.
When your mates boasted about 2go accounts they were no match for your countless Facebook accounts, Instagram handle and your WhatsApp status that you updated every day of the summer holiday to pepper dem with the care free life style you had at home—mundane but when all these were accomplished no one could talk to you anyhow, your voice could be heard. It got you the respect you didn't get during your school knickers days.

You had a high throne amongst those who had seen movie series with long episodes that Aba boys cut and converted into seasons that could go up to ten and eleven and you watched them all, narrated the parts that people didn't go far to watch and they made you the king of werewolves and vampire movie series.
It got into your head.  Then you started making them believe that you were a werewolf with the way you constantly disappeared into the wild valley for a long time, practically depicting everything that a shape shifter would say and do to make any one believe—your incisors was the selling strategy and your disappearance from the class at night prep whenever the moon was full. 

You managed to get two scape goats that couldn't keep their buttocks on their seats for prep for ten minutes, they always had something they wanted to collect or somebody to see and you took that as the best opportunity to intentionally scare them out of their lives. They ran back to their class and narrated the tale to the rest of your class mates and they thought that you probably had something broken in your head. But the probability that you had something broken in your head brought you more attention on a platter of gold.

The fifth year in school wasn't as cherry as the previous years, you wished you could go back to them. Your constant worry about your mother's frail health humbled you a little.
You didn't mind spending half of that term at home to take care of her while your father bussed around for money to pay her treatment bills. He must've assured you that she was going to be fine because you stopped worrying at some point and chose to look on the bright side. It felt good for that period but it didn't last because She eventually she died. It tore you apart. You felt anger rupture inside you after the denial and emotional breakdown, then you began to bargain on how life would feel so empty without her.

It didn't take long before the depression set in; you began to shut people out; people who cared for you and you didn't take their word for it when they said you would be fine eventually. You shut them out because nothing made sense anymore and not a word of consolation was going to bring her back.
It was a miracle that it didn't affect your school work but the depression had a huge effect on you; time collapsed and an entire week could blend to create a whirlpool of worry, overthinking that felt like you were slowly drowning in the ocean of your own thoughts. You didn't like this suffocating feeling so you try to remember the things that made you happy, the people that made life worth living but you won't find anything as your brain had slowly wiped off every memory of what brought you happiness. Eventually all you can think of is how miserable life has always been and how it will continue to be this way. Little did you know that you were at the fourth stage of grief. 

You didn't believe your peers when they told you that you would recover from the darkness but all it took you was long conversation with this girl that was always too comfortable in her personal space even when everyone getting cliqued and clustered with friends. She didn't need a dead relative to completely understand how empty you felt from the loss of your mother. She made you see that life would always give you a reason to be angry at things that you cannot change—in her case her mother was pregnant after sixteen years and she knew that babies always changed everything. She told you she was angry about it at first, and all about how things would change for her and her other siblings and she chose to see the good in it; after all babies brought joy and brought people closer. It was a lot different from your own plight. You could have hissed with disgust and shunned her off but you decided to draw lesson from it. Things happened for a reason, there were changes in life and this life wouldn't be complete without change. Perhaps your mother's death was meant to draw you and your family close together to learn the importance of family bond and open doors that you never knew existed. It was there that you arrived at the final stage. Acceptance.

Nevertheless you resumed the last year of school as a new person. You had passed through life and you knew what loss felt like, you grew with it and came out as a better person. With time you changed. You wanted to explore life, a continuation from where the denial and depression took over.

Then you began to have feelings for this girl that saw you for who you really were. She didn't judge you for the irrational decisions you took and it made you soft. You didn't like being vulnerable so you didn't show it even when you realized that she was the undivided attention you sought for a long time. You acted tough and expected her to press further but she had goals set for herself. It was the last year and she wanted to ace exams for her dream course and choice of university, she didn't need the distraction even though she felt the exact way as you did; your push off was a good enough reason for her to stick to her aspirations. 

Some days you'd talk to her and some other days you would push off, then she began to think that there was some kind of fault with the juke box in your head.
The time you spent in school at the last year was little and made the most use of it. You had fun, got enough attention and made people laugh, you felt depressed and angry, pushed people away and you were selfish. But you were human and perhaps the fault in your juke box was the disability of people to see you for what you are.