High 1
HIGH
Mayowa Ojo
6/10/20263 min read
The first time I saw it happen I could not believe my eyes. I might as well have been in a dream and it was so good I did not want it to end. It started out so suddenly, colouring my otherwise boring existence from where I sat. I leaned forward, eager to see the whole thing unfold once I got over the screaming around me.
Indeed, I heard the sound but I had no clue what it was. Once I did, no amount of shouting could keep me in my seat. I inched closer, somehow wishing to be a part of the scene yet excited to just watch.
First the bang then the screeching which very quickly became a skidding of sort and then the summersaults. I watched the accident unfold before me as people screamed from the bus in front of me. I saw hands flailing through the windows as people tried to climb out as if it really were possible. Body parts, mostly arms, soon littered the expressway.
While my mother was screaming out her lungs like someone was hurting her really bad, I noticed my father had gone quiet. I cast a glance in his direction and found him looking at me through the rear view mirror. Then and only then did it occur to me that I was grinning, my elation borderline palpable. In that moment I knew I was an adrenaline junkie.
I tried to hide my excitement but it was too late. I had been spotted and so I wore my joy like a coat of many colours because I knew what would follow and I was right. Father told mother about me and that shifted her mental gear into overdrive. She cursed me out and cursed the day I was born. She yelled endlessly about how she had no idea where I came from and wondered why she’d been cursed to have me as her child. She cursed me for blocking her womb and preventing her from having another child etc.
When she noticed there was no remorse on my face – and that my father had gone out to help the victims, instructing her to stay with me because he did not trust me to be alone in the car – she took off her seatbelt in one fluid movement and whacked me hard across my face. I tasted blood in my mouth and knew that if I did not make the right face, I would be feeding on my own blood for lunch!
Flash forward fifteen years. I’m older and staying alone. Mother is dead and daddy is bitter… towards me. His reasons are simple to him: one, my troubles killed his beloved wife in the form of a cardiac arrest and two, I was not helping to take care of my younger sister as I should. He failed to realize mother died long before she did when she refused to take things calmly. She was always shouting and stomping around and bitter and commanding all because she blamed me for her inability to have another child. She believed I was evil or mentally ill or both. Either way she was hell-bent on not having a spoiled-rotten only-child... like that was possible even in her imagination.
So unlike all the lofty stories you hear about only children, my life was a nightmare. It was only a matter of time before I started to believe most of the things that she said about me. Even now, in her death, her words still have more power over me than I care to admit but I digress.
When I was twenty years old, mother became pregnant for father and they were as excited as they were worried. I believe they realized the life of the young one was not safe seeing as there was finally proof that I had no such magical powers to prevent mother from conception after my birth. I often wish I did though.
Did I want to kill my baby sister? Of course. Within the first few months of her arrival I fantasized a lot about placing her in the bathtub as she cried while I filled up the space around her with water. How could I not? Mother did not let me touch her or leave me in the same room with my own sister. This was only one of the subtler ways I dreamed of snuffing out her life. I couldn’t be sure if the plans I had in my head were more exciting than the pain I also dreamed of seeing in father and mother’s eyes.