At War

Chapter 27

Blooming in adversity
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Obanma often checked her phone while the lecture went on in her scantily filled lecture hall. It was often said that the actual number of a class was always discovered on an exam day. Students were scattered across the room in different attires with a prominent look of fatigue. lectures had begun almost at first light and the students had been voraciously absorbing knowledge from different lectures and periods which they knew would by 6pm.

The last lecture was unfortunately handled by a man the students loathed because of his sluggish manner of speech. His nicknames ranged from sloth, tortoise to diverse names in the students native dialects. The lecturer stood in front the podium, his notes secured in his hands while he occasionally scribbled important things on their whiteboard.

The black public address system which was situated a distance from where the man stood, seemed utterly useless as the plethora of sounds that emanated from it rather induced sleep rather than inculcate knowledge despite how many times he supposedly yelled into the microphone . Obanma was seated amongst other students who paid little attention to the lecturer while he sluggishly taught them.

The students had renamed his class as sleeping pill owing to the fact that half of the class was always thrown into slumber before his period was over. While some students prepared properly for this improper slumber by wearing shades and caps for the sole purpose of keeping the act covert, others shamelessly drooled over the desks were they slept. It was a reoccurring event mapped out on Thursdays.

Mr Emenike Ogu most students argued should have become a kindergarten teacher, with specialty in reading bed time stories. Most of his lectures rarely excited the students except for few resilient ones who had an immunity against sleep.

Obanma was occasionally among the few who learnt from him but the day had strangely diminished her resilience and she found herself nodding unconsciously to the things said. Her notes were filled with points written in haphazard manner. Some appeared meaningless because she had begun them awake and happened to finish them unconsciously while her hands adamantly decided to complete the task  getting no commands from her brain cells.

She believed this to have come as a result of the unusually high number of students sleeping peacefully in close proximity to her. Sleep was often infectious .

The lecturer seemed quite unperturbed by the gross level of inattentiveness by the students, the smart ones knew retribution for such mistakes always came during the examinations.

Obanma's last resort was her phone which she swiped rapidly playing random games just to keep sleep at bay.

A text from Onyedikachi popped into her phone and it sent her heart rate over the edge as she read the words over and over again. It drove sleep to the depths of her mind and she wondered if a text like Onyedikachi's was what most students needed.

"My day would end better because I'd get a kiss from an angel 😋"

She believed her heart somersaulted more than twice and she helplessly grinned to the words, reminiscing on how his lips had felt on hers the last time they kissed.

"In as much as low levels of Serotonin could be an indicator for low libido, there are other vital roles it plays!"

The words came almost immediately her tongue slowly swiped across her lips in remembrance of her encounter with the man that suddenly sent her receptive nerves and hormones on overdrive and she quickly looked up to see if Mr Emenike had read her thoughts.

"Tryptophan is a major constituent of Serotonin which I believe is not new to you. In fact I will not be discussing how serotonin is formed.