I'm sure most of you use Instagram in this day and age, and whether you have a big following or a few, it has become a platform that society uses.
The app has over a billion users worldwide, and I find it insane.
I had about 200 followers at the time this happened, and most of my followers were family and friends I knew from way back in school, in my neighborhood, or friends of my family, nuclear and extended.
You see, I lived and grew up in Achara Layout with my parents, the oldest girl of 4 kids, and the most stubborn. Obianodo Street was a family type-of neighborhood consisting of homes of different people living with their families. It was a pretty tight circle; the market, our various schools, and our place of Sunday worship were closely located.
Having grown up around this routine, you would begin to understand how hard it was to get a grip of other locations in Enugu --Coal City as it was fondly called-- let alone, other states in Nigeria.
You would begin to understand how a platform with over a billion people, would be overwhelming for someone like me.
And it was.
I didn't know a lot of people outside my social and family circle.
So, this night while watching a movie my phone vibrated. It said a boy named Fred started following me on Instagram. So, I opened up the app to check out his profile.
Oh my, was he handsome? He was this tall, chiseled face with abs kind-of guy. And he flaunted his frame a lot in his pictures.
He had about 11,000 followers and grand pictures of some of the poshest places in Lagos. He looked like the type of guy with never-ending fun. Though I didn't have that type of "growing up" environment, I envied what such a life would seem like.
His pictures were livid and his features were screaming out of them. I don't know how models are supposed to be; never fancied how someone into modeling should look like, but if there was going to be any definition as to how a young male model should be in my head, this was one. I clicked around some of the profiles tagged in his pictures, faces I could recognize in his photos from their Avis, and display pictures. All plush and classy; there were pictures with beautiful girls and nice cars, places he visited, recurrent pictures of his family and siblings, and relatives who shared the same surname with him.
Usually, when I get followers like this, I check to make sure it's an authentic account. He had as much as 1000 likes per picture, and comments from a bunch of girls I'd assume he didn't even know, leaving him love, hearts, and lovestruck smiley emojis.
And then, just that instant as I was going through his page and that of his contacts, before I could even follow him back, he "dm-ed" me.
He said, "Hey, I honestly don't do this a lot but I think you are beautiful."
Not trying to be giddy, I have a pretty good body. I'm 6 feet tall and I have been told I'm a looker all my life. I've had both males and females turn on certain occasions to get a second look at me or the view from behind. To have always known I was beautiful, subconsciously made me wary of guys and their flatteries.
But Fred was handsome and even though I have never met him before, I "dm-ed" him back and said, "Thank you and I think you are cute too."
And then we went on to have a pretty long discussion and it went well. We talked about places we had or had not been, things we did for fun and family. To be honest, he was good at conversations.
He talked a lot about himself but not boastful, more like lets-get-to-know-each-other kind of way.
It didn't feel boring at all.
His parents were wealthy, I would consider mine middle class. He had the opportunity to go to some big private school there in Lagos, and visit relatives outside the country whenever he was on school breaks and holidays. He was fun, very chatty, had a few funny video clips on his Instagram page, joked and goofed a lot.
It was hard not to develop a liking for him.
And with all that; his parent's affluence, his family, his friends, and his social media popularity, there was just something genuine in the way he said he likes me.
