As Old as a Bicycle

You know how sometimes, just before you're about to take certain decisions, your mind tells you that it's a bad decision to take but you do it anyway? That happened to me today and now I'm paying the price.

We have a mandatory sit-at-home order today here in the east side of Nigeria and for some reason, today's order was a lot more serious that the previous ones. So everyone had stayed at home, but the boys had decided that they wanted to play football.

_{photo by Jannes Glas}

I haven't played for quite some time now but decided to go anyway. On our way to the field, I began to have this feeling to not play anymore, to just turn back and go home but I had ignored it and continued.

When we eventually got to the field, everything had gone as expected. Luckily for us, nothing out of the expected happened because during days like this where the sit-at-home order is a lot more serious than the rest, there are usually gunshots and deaths reported here and there.

But we had played today's football and had gotten back home safe and sound, only for me to try to take my bath and realized that I couldn't move my body. I couldn't bend down or move my body as freely as I used to and it was all thanks to my decision earlier that morning, the football one.

Simply because it's been a while I've played football, all of my body (and probably bones) have gotten so stiff to the extent where I now feel like an old man whenever I try to do simple things like bending down to pick something up, due to the pains that I feel and the amount of bone cracking sound that I hear.

From the moment I got home, it was obvious I would need some sort of magic massage to get everything straight like it used to be but that didn't happen, and now, after some few hours of shut-eye, I have woken up feeling a lot worse. If something bad was to happen around here, I couldn't even run for my life as it is, as the whole of my body feel like an old rusted bicycle that needs to be applied oil at the right places to help it work again.

It's going to be a long night for me, I know... I just pray and hope that I haven't done some permanent damages to my body because I really don't feel so good.