Eighteen O' Five {ONGOING}🇳🇬

•~~Chapter One~~•

It had been just the two of us in the car, my mom and I. We’d been driving the long route to the beach to join my dad and Olamipo for our tenth birthday celebration.

A rush of giddy with excitement had filled me and I’d been unable to sit still. I’d played with the MP3 player in the car, switching from channel to channel till I found some nice music and then I’d turned up it's volume to the highest until the car was practically vibrating with the sound waves. But my mom had been in a really good mood, she hadn’t minded.
The car seemed to shake with every boom the speaker made and it thrilled me, prompting me to laugh and sing loudly along to the music.

"Well done o! Omo baba olowo! I’ll let you have your fun this time since it's your day," she had told me at top of her voice.

Eventually, she’d joined me and we sang merrily away, our faces stretched wide with happy grins.
But the fun didn't last for long.
One minute, we were happy, singing and enjoying ourselves but the next minute, we were screaming, our car being flipped multiple times across the high way.

When I woke up, I was in the hospital and my mom was dead.
I later learned my mom had died before help could arrive. She hadn’t even stood a chance.

Too young to fully comprehend what death meant, I’d kept expecting mom to walk into the room and we’d laugh and get on with our lives but she never did. I’d become numb when it finally occurred to me that she never would.

The funeral came and went and I watched my dad and sister cry when they thought no one was watching. I blamed myself for her death, stopped eating and often overdosed on painkillers in futile attempts to take my life. I wished I’d died instead of her and I blamed everything on myself.

It taken months of therapy to shake me off that mindset but sometimes, when I was at my lowest, my thoughts still wandered down that dark rabbit hole.

I kept waiting for someone to scream at me and tell me that it was all my fault but no one ever did. They didn’t blame me for her death instead, they pampered me and treated me like gold.

I still saw Doctor Aminu, my therapist, once in a while. Even after my main sessions with him, he kept on calling to monitor my mental welfare.

He had even called some hours after we arrived at the town. We’d talked about my exams and how I wasn't glad I’d spend my Christmas in Ibudu
n.

“Olamide, you need to stayrt seeing the good in every situation you find yourself from now on,” he’d said like some kind of sage with the keys to a good life. “Always think about the bright side of everything.”
All that talk didn't make me feel any better but I was in the town already.

What could I do?

Olimpo and I helped out with the arrangement of the furniture and other accessories in the house as soon as the women were done cleaning while my dad insisted he would handle the cooking. Little did we know it was would be a bad idea.
The soup was fairly edible but the amala he’d made was rock solid!

The two nights we had spent in the town would have been hell without the standby generator that was available in the house. We would have died under the sweltering heat or broken a few bones in the darkness of the night since there was barely any power to charge our phones. It was a lifesaver
.
I couldn't help but wonder how people in the town who couldn’t get one for themselves had survived without a constant power supply. The power would come on for one day, and spend the next two days off. It
was crazy!

And talking of crazy, the roads were no exemptions. There were potholes everywhere, abandoned cars further narrowing the already tight roadsides and, to top it all, poor drainage.
There was no doubt that the government didn't do enough for the town. Or, perhaps they did but the leaders of the town, very possibly, had filled their pockets with their town’s public funds instead.