She Is Blind

Chapter Eighteen: New Things

I had won the bet after all, a few days later. Blessing had told my brother that she did not want a love relationship with him, and would prefer that they remain just friends although she said she personally liked him a lot, and considered him her playful son. He blamed it all on me however, for having dated Blessing before him, and I was lost for words. All I could tell him was to bait for a girl within his reach and promise him I would not demand the 10,000 naira.

She had left for school too, about three weeks after she got her admission letter, not after spending the whole day before she left with my brother and I. Although from that point on after she left, if I had thought that the time was running fast, everything was moving slower than ever. My brother and I had gone back to being alone with each other, and I started being alone at home every morning except on weekends after he and my sister resumed school. I managed to reach Blessing on phone every day, and she always sounded very happy to talk to us too but I was slowly losing my cool and going through several mixes of different and conflicting emotions, depressions, and anxiety in the course of waiting a whole two months for my turn to resume that new and unopened chapter of school.

Compared with how my twin friends had both left for their respective universities in a very short while, so as to live that free life that we all had always craved in Secondary school, my waiting seemed like a thousand years. I was also waiting to hear the phone call that would bring the voice of my love to my ears, the two things I wanted most in that period of my life. Her father was already back from France after he had paired her up with someone who would be her caretaker, and his stories of France and French life did nothing to excite me. He, however had assured us that Gift would soon be able to reach us and talk to us. Time was running slower than ever, and sometimes I had found myself screaming into my pillow because of frustration, but time really did pass by, and I was soon preparing myself to start the University.

As those days drew closer, my frustration had been replaced with a kind of fear of the unknown, and in my case, there were several unknowns. I had lived in Abuja all my life, but now I was to school in Lagos, a city famed for how dynamic it could be. I had heard several stories about Lagos, both good and bad, and they had just made me more confused. I was also afraid of meeting new people, from backgrounds as different as mine, of being initiated into the underground cult groups in the school, and of the kind of lecturers I would meet. Combined with this fear was a bit of excitement, and at times I felt the two at the same time, and had resorted to praying to God to make everything smooth for me.

Initially after Gift had left, the sound of my phone ringing usually made me feel expectant. I would stupidly take a peek at the phone screen, hoping it was Gift, and the disappointment on seeing another phone number would be in my mind for hours. Two weeks after her departure, I had started losing interest in the whole thing, and as time went on, without Blessing there to reassure me, I was beginning to feel as though Gift did not really care. I was beginning to hate the locket she gave me, and I stopped wearing it every day like I used to when she left, preferring to keep it under my pillow.

It was one Tuesday morning when I had just woken up from sleep that I saw a missed call from a foreign looking number, and although very recently I had been thinking I would be nonplussed and unexcited if Gift were to call me, my heart began a very excited thumping. I called the number back, and after what seemed like forever, the voice I had yearned to hear for almost a month filtered from the phone speaker, exciting my eardrums.

“My dear loving David, the one and only love in the whole entire world that I have missed so much and want to be in his arms again.” she said very quickly in an excited voice.

I jumped excitedly and started blushing instantly. “My love finally got to reach me,” was all I could say with all the excess joy that was radiating in my every being.