MY SPIRITUAL WIFE
EPISODE 1
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I’d grown up like every normal child but nothing about me had ever felt normal.
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Where every other person (my mate) found a certain task or achievement difficult, “they”, on the other hand, fall in pleasant places for me, effortlessly.
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Growing up; back in primary school, I’d often find money in my school bag. This usually happened every time I wished I could spend as much as my classmates were spending on biscuits and sweets.
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At first, I thought these were possibly monies I’d forgotten in my school bag until it became a “recurring decimal.”
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I got used to these mysterious monies and it gradually grew on me to become a norm.
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I once attempted to tell my step mother about these monies I frequently found inside my school bag; pockets, but she slapped the words right back into my mouth. She said I was spewing rubbish and that there was no such thing as “miracle money”.
My step mother went as far as saying that I’d been stealing her money and that it was these “stash” I always found in my bag and assumed they were “mysterious”.
“My God has caught you today!” My step mother said, as she beat the living daylight out of me that day.
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Since I knew that talking to that woman was a lost cause, “bottling up” these experiences and every other that followed, began that day.
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Whenever I go to sleep at night, something strange happens. I’d usually have dreams where I “merry” with very unusual faces and other times, very familiar faces.
I wake up from these sleeps wondering if these were mere dreams or there was more to it because of how real they usually felt.
I don’t usually know what these dreams meant.
As far as I was concerned, I’d slept and woken up like every other person and nothing about any of these was a big deal. But surprisingly, every time I got back to school the next day (after one of these dreams), a particular girl in my class always appeared to know about my night; about these dreams.
It was always as though she’d featured in it and remembers every tiny little detail.
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Oluchi would usually walk up to me and try to strike a conversation starting from where we’d seemingly stopped from my dream, the previous night.
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I found this strange every time but for some reason, I never asked Oluchi how she managed to do; to know as much as she always seemed to know.
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Oluchi walked her way to becoming my very good friend.
Oluchi would always ensure that whenever her mother packed her lunch, she packed mine too.
It felt very good to have a friend such as Oluchi at the time, especially as I had a step mother who almost never cared if I’d eaten; what I’d eaten or even, if someone like me deserved to eat.
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One day, Oluchi called me out in the middle of the night. It felt like one of my usual dreams, only that this time around, it wasn’t.
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Oluchi knocked at my door that night.
Strangely, I wasn’t scared. I simply woke up; stood up, walked over to the door and unlocked it.
Then Oluchi beckoned on me.
I went out to meet her in the company of other children our age.
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My father and step mother’s room was just next door (right opposite mine). For some reason, I cared less about how my step mother would react if she heard my door open at this time of the night.
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The first and the last time I’d ever pulled this stunt was a couple of months prior. I’d sleepwalked and found my way outside my room. But my stepmother made sure to beat that spirit of “sleep walking” out of my body that very night.
So it it never happened again.
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My step mother doesn’t sleep deeply so imagine my surprise when she didn’t wake up at all. For some reason, she had slept deeper than usual, this very night.
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Oluchi held my hand and the other children too soon joined in this fashion, holding each other.
Oluchi chanted some gibberish and in a twinkle of an eye, we were no longer at my house.
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We were now in a very big, long hall. A hall that was filled with a lot of children; children who were mostly my age mates.
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If I was asked to round up the figures I’d seen to the nearest fraction, I’ll say three million.
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We all seemed as though, relatives.
We all seemed as though, birthed by one woman; a woman that was comfortably seated on a very huge throne.
Our supposed “mother” was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up until that point. She was beautifully adorned in gold from head to toe. She was very light skinned and had very long hair which looked amazing in braids.
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On this particular day, we were having a feast. Our mother seemed to have recently given birth to more children and we had all converged to celebrate their arrival.
We eat; drank; danced and played in various ways. One of those included “the mummy and daddy kind”.
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Every time we played in this manner, Oluchi and I were usually paired.
The first time I tried to have Oluchi and I switched with others, Oluchi didn’t talk to me in school the following morning and the week that followed.
Oluchi stopped having her mum pack me lunch too (an act that really shattered my heart to bits).
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“Paul, what is it about these other girls that you often make me believe that you prefer them to me?” Oluchi asked me one day, during one of our break times.
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We were only eleven at the time, so imagine how lost for words I was, out of ignorance to what Oluchi was possibly talking about.
To be continued…
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Moshood Avidiime
