Meanwhile when all this madness was going on back and forth, in my village those who were at my age still treated me pretty much the same as they played me at an emotional level. You know what, I won’t be doing anyone any favour if I paint all of this with some nurturing words, these guys were simply abusive towards me. They did so by mocking me because of the quiet person I was and the fact that I had preferred to stay in my yard rather than roaming the streets as everyone else did. I was living under the shadow of being the ill-treated kid in the village, laughed at up to the point I got used to it. I no longer took it personally.

This led me to a point wondering and asking myself if I was born to suffer. I can’t remember anyone telling these boys to stop what they were doing, it almost felt like even the old ones were enjoying this as they went along with it while I was slowly dying inside. Every day I kept wondering who was going to tell them to stop or at least condemn them for what they were doing to me? No one came to my rescue, thus at times I believed that this was my fate and the only way was to accept it and go with the flow like a laminar flow, and have no worries but have hope that everything is going to be all right.

Even so, I was doing quite well in life, in terms of my schooling, besides all the negativity. I was living my life to the fullest when I think about where I wanted to be in in terms of my goals. On that part of my life, nothing and no one could stand in my way. Having fake friends, low-key abandoning your true comrade and living everyday just as it is, I’m really surprised that despite such minor issues there was actually some positives in my life.

I feel like the presence of Mister Mike certainly played an enormous role in being productive with my schoolwork and working towards my dreams. I remember how he used to tell us about real life stories, which in a sense you could regard it as fiction because of the manner he would tell it and how myth-like they sounded. Most of the students were usually bored with all these stories, which came in a sense of lecturing one about the difficulties of real life obstacles. To me, I regard him as the most brutally honest human beings I have ever come across. I certainly don’t imagine ever meeting another individual like Mister Mike.

For some reason I pictured him as the father I wished and longed for, who of course, was living somewhere in the big cities, which consumed almost every black man who was supposed to have raised his children. That is why I regard Mister Mike as the fatherly figure I had, which obviously did not know much about my existence. One thing I loved about Mike is that he told us specifically that life is a mess and if you don’t get your act together then you’re doomed. Funny enough, I listened to him but never acted upon it.

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