You Did Well Today

because you could choose to sleep away your life.

You wake up in the morning. Today, you are going to do well. You can feel it because your alarm goes off and you don’t say, “just a few more minutes”, knowing it could turn into hours in no time. You spring up. You pray Subhi on time. It’s already giving ‘responsible adult’. You are elated.

You get ready for the day. You dress up real nice in clothes you took from your sister. Whatever happens, you know that at least you are looking fine as hell. Looking for what to eat is such a hassle. If you could afford to, you wouldn’t participate in such activity. But today is a good day and somebody sent you 10k. You would have loved to wait until you knew who it was but will you know after hunger has killed you? No.

All that is in your head now is golden yam, plantain, fries and chicken so you set out to go find this combo.

On a second thought, you would eat that later. Mama Abba sells akara and kunu just around the corner. You change your clothes because you cannot come and be smelling smoke up and down.

You are eating your akara and scrolling through IG. Liking some. Commenting some. Stalking some. Posting some…you can spend more than half of your day on Tinubu’s internet. But not today. The spirit of social media will not take up your time. When you look at at it, it is not even far from witchcraft because why are you just going from page to page, watching videos after videos, buying 2.5 gb for 500 naira 3 times in a day with money you don’t have! Ahh!

You might as well start thinking of how to make money from spending so much time there.

You forget you are still a student but resumption will clear your eyes soon enough. You remembered something else. Your online courses!

You open your system ( which you also took from your sister). Oh how that device has seen life. The broken screen is not even the one that is paining you, to run applications take forever. But you don’t have a choice, so you use it like that. It is you that wants to be a product designer.

Your sister calls you to ask when you’re getting the materials for your Eid clothes. She sews so she sends you styles to choose. You choose none. You are probably going to sketch what you want and hopes she gets the idea. Are you looking forward to sallah? Maybe just a bit.

It’s only midday. The sun will fry you if you dared step out. So while you wait for her to calm down so you can go to only God knows where, a movie won’t be a bad idea. But typical you couldn’t decide on what to watch. You decide to work on tasks you were given because somehow, you find yourself interning (that’s a word I think) in Communications at an NGO.

You are having a good day because you could be sleeping away your life. You could make your day about your problems and choose use all the hours to fuss over them. You could be sick. Hell, you could even die. But, you’re here. You are making the most of your time even when you know it could get ruined at any moment. In truth, you are your biggest motivation.

And because of that, you wear the fine ass clothes you took off earlier. Looked yourself in the mirror and grabbed your purse.