HARMATTAN

Chapter 2

Hosea picked up another shirt, this was the fourth shirt he was trying on, and he just wasn't satisfied. He finally admitted to himself that maybe he had a little bit of OCD as he glanced around his perfectly arranged room, the sun rays reflected into his room, illuminating a perfect bachelor's room, white walls with a simple artwork of ocean blue  showing a little boy standing on a boat. The artwork looked lonely like his room, with the dominating colour mostly white and black with an exception of his bed sheet which was grey and white , in fact without the rays of sun the room was almost grey.

He walked up to the mirror in the bathroom to check himself, he rubbed his hands on his stubble, it was already itchy but he decided maybe it was time to grow a little bit of beard and just have a new look. His average height and his slim look made him always look younger than his age of twenty eight. His  dark in complexion stood out in the morning reflections of the sun into his bathroom. He rubbed his jaw, using his finger to trace a long scar that ran from under his right nostrils slanting  faintly down into his jaw. Rubbing his hand on it brought back memories he would rather not wallow into.
  
But the mind always have mind of its own as they drifted back to sometimes ago, a place that has decided to make itself comfortable in his memory palace.  His mind flashed back to a a fair skin lady, he always thought at a point bin his life that she must be the lady in red, only that she wasn't dressed in red most times in his imaginations in fact that a vivid description of her petite beauty.

Shaking off his memory, he moved to his bed and straightened the sheets, he wasn't sure what he wanted to wear, so stalling with his memory and allowing his OCD to take over his impulse overwhelmed him as he shifted the foot mat near his bed, to be candid it wasn't really displaced in fact it was just slightly slanted but to him, it made the feet of his bed looked a bit confused. His mother always told him he got that trait from his father, who had different set of  cutleries depending on whatever he was eating.
"Your room is like an arranged box filled with crates of egg, just a little mistake, can lead to a crack" that was what his ex fiancée always said whenever she enters his room and try to assist in  arranging  his room but he always told her that he didn't need help doing that, not because he didn't appreciate her effort but he just always loved to allow his stuffs to always be they way they are, the usual excuse he gave was that leaving things the way they were always made things easier for him to find. Even the slightest movement of an item  looks very untidy to him. Everyone always complained about his obsession with neatness and sanity and he always thought that if anybody didn't understand him, his ex always did and understood his obsession with neatness since his dreadful encounter during his youth service when he was in camp and saw a dead round worm come out of his own body.  It was the most traumatising  event of his life.

Flashing back during his youth service days brought back the memories he always prayed everyday of his life to forget and move on, but when someone become a part of you so much that the person is like your skin, it is almost impossible to completely ignore that person.
Funmi and him were in the same platoon in camp. when Hosea meet her he knew deep down that she wasa breathe of fresh air, she was mint in his life a mint and it took him four years to actually figure out why she gave someone who was generally shy to approach ladies a chance.
he always wondered about it in all their four years of relationship but he later got his answer after an almost wedding.
Very topical of a Nigerian lady, always after the money and not necessarily the personality, his education as a medical doctor who studied abroad didn't help matters in fact it only boosted the reason Funmi wanted to pin another man's child on him.

To be candid he fell for it hook line and sinker, he was so blinded by pleasing her so much that he couldn't think outside the reality. His smart sister was the one that figured it out and called his attention to it and after a lot of nagging he decided to try to notice things that were hiding in plain sight around him and that was when he finally discovered she had been  cheating on him for almost two years with one of his colleagues. Cancellation of the wedding was like a knockout during dewali season.  He was too shock to listen to any advise and for the first three months he was self destructing , so bad that his sister became too concerned and advised him to change his environment.