After Dark...

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It’s kind of surprising just how much an entire area can change at night. Once the sun sets and the lights come up, it would be as if you’re in a totally different place entirely. If that is your first time navigating the area, you could have trouble finding your way, it won’t matter how attentive you were to detail during the day.

During the day, you would be able to look out for landmarks and they would be easy to spot from afar, so you’ll be able to know beforehand if you’re going in the right direction or not. However, at night, it’s a different ballgame altogether. Once the darkness has blanketed everything, it’s fair game, it’s as if you’re learning the area all over again from scratch.

It’s for this reason that I try my best to avoid being on the road at night. I’m not a night crawler, I’ve never been and it’s not something that even remotely interests me. I try my best to avoid moving about at night, but if I do find that I can’t avoid it, I know how to handle myself. The only kind of night movement that I like is the one where I don’t get to face traffic. As long as it’s within walking distance from my home, then I can do it and even enjoy it as well.

Because night movements will humble you if you’re not careful, you can even get lost in an area you think you’re familiar with. The same thing happened to me just a few nights back. I’ve been living in Imo State now for close to five years, and I’ve never really done much night movements. I did it during my earliest days here, back when I was a network marketer and I was always moving from town to town, spreading the good news of our products. Sometimes, the seminars took too long or the traffic held us for way too long, forcing us to return home at night.

However, that fateful day was my first time being in Douglas at night. Douglas is an area in Owerri, and it can be quite notorious. Nothing happened to me sha, just the fact that the place that I’ve been passing regularly since I gained admission into my school suddenly became strange to me just because it was dark. I found it quite unsettling.

At night, things can get quite rowdy. You have to be on guard and extremely careful. You won’t find buses parked on the road anymore (I really don’t know why they do this, maybe for security reasons) so to get on a bus, you’ll have to flag one down. Now, flagging a bus down will also require you to be careful so you don’t flag down armed robbers and kidnappers. You’d have to be really careful and watch the other passengers clearly before you get in.

So, I was making my way to the area where I would get a bus back to my school. However, I forgot that at night the buses don’t park, I’d have to flag one down. So, I was walking down the busy road, looking for where they were parked. The place was quite dark, and I was walking really fast because the last thing you wanted was for the riff-raffs to suspect that you were lost. After walking for a while, I realized that I had walked for way too long and I should have gotten to the park.

Yet, I didn’t find it. I didn’t even see any bus that would take me to my school. At a point, while I knew the general area I was at, I didn’t know which point exactly that I was in. So, I kept walking… until I saw a bank. Thankfully, that bank was my landmark and it told me exactly where I was. That was also where I stood until I was able to flag down a bus that took me to my school. And that was how I got home.

It’s crazy, I know. But the presence and absence of light can have such a profound effect on us. They’re both important, and they both serve their purpose. We don’t have a choice about them though, we get to both light and darkness. Just as many of us have mastered the light, we should also learn our way around the dark. That way, when we find ourselves submerged in the darkness, we won’t be found wanting.

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.}

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