Mirror

Stars in Heaven

  All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time. – Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

She was walking home from school as per her usual schedule. Actually her usual schedule was walking home with Michael but she didn't really feel like walking with him right at that moment. She wanted to be alone for a while. Her exams were coming up the week after and she just wanted to concentrate on her studies and focus her mind on something, anything apart from Idunu. She walked past the electrical poles, swinging on one like she had done she was little. She looked up at the sky and just let her face bathe in the sunlight. Lago was a forever sunny place but sometimes the sun worked in her favour. Living in their small estate, they were a bit secluded from all the happenings of the outside state but she liked it that way, quiet and ideal. She was walking to her house but to save time she took the shortcut. It wasn't much of a shortcut really but it was a quiet out of the way alley. Young couples all around the estate came to put their names on the old, aged stone walls. She walked past until she saw newer fresher initials, then she saw it encased in a crudely drawn heart.

S.A & M.S

It was quite romantic now that she thought about it, writing down your love on something that had lasted for decades hoping that your love would do the same.

Shiv had been thinking about love lately. Was love a feeling or a choice. She was sure she felt it whenever she saw her mother, she felt it deep in her soul, like she would do anything for her. She also thought she felt it when she saw Michael, he made her feel giddy on the inside. So maybe it was a feeling. But Idunu's mum had told her about her father before, how he was a bad person. She never really went into details but she got the gist, he was a bad man but she had stayed with him nonetheless for Idunu and then grew into loving him. All from a choice she had made for her daughter. But later on, she had left him when he started getting worse. She got enough money from her then waitressing job and moved to an apartment in a quiet estate in Lagos. So maybe love was a choice, then. Or was it both a feeling and a choice? She didn't have time to even ponder more on the question as she looked up and realised she was at her apartment complex already. She walked up slowly to her floor and when she got to her door she paused, was that a noise she heard? Robberies weren't rare around the area they lived in and Shiv was panicking. She held the key inside her fist as she opened the door silently hoping to use it as a weapon against the intruder.

She heard the noise again, it seemed to be coming from her mother's room. She stalked the room, her heart seemed to be trying to escape her ribcage as she approached the door. She barged into the room expecting to find a man, or at least men going through her mother's things. She did find a man, though but he was...on top her mother?

Her mother looked up at her and in shock, the man came off and stared at her. Three of them seemed to be locked in the world's most awkward situation, she had known her mum was dating but she wasn't expecting that. The man looked like he was in his early forties with a slight belly. His beard was fully grown, though. now that she got a good look at him, he sort of looked like...

"Oh God, are you Idunu's dad?" she said, her hand closing her mouth, realising the gravity of this situation. The man just stared in shock and then it was like someone had just shone a light into her face and showed her the answer to a question she had been thinking about for the longest time. She didn't even know what else to say, she just started to back out of the room slowly, with open wide eyes that couldn't seem to shut or unsee what she just saw.

"Idunu, now wait, just calm down, let me explain." her mother pleaded, but she might as well have been talking to air because Idunu was already running out. Running away from her home. And from the mess that now her life. There was only one person that she wanted to talk to now, and she knew just where he lived.

On the way, she found herself cursing how stupid she was. She was avoiding Michael and now when she was going through one of the worst things in her life, here she was running back towards him. Michael's house loomed just ahead.