MY DEAR WORST FRIEND

It was very early in the morning, the time

was still not 7:00AM when he shouted my name. He sounded like a wounded animal in distress to my ears from afar. My eyes were glued together and they won't just open. I struggled to get up from my bed. Washing my face with my palm, I staggered as I took few steps to reach for the door.  I opened the door and let him in. He sounded too excited so I guess he had something important to tell me.


"my guy, my guy" he said as he showed me his nairabet gambling ticket. He has won himself about four thousand naira. The excitement on his face clearly explained his profound joy. "We don hammer "  he screamed. Finally someone is ready to pay for what we like. "reward for the passion" that's the name they call it.

What could be more fascinating? We've finally found a means of living. The betting house became our office. Punctuality was our watchword and we still do overtime to make sure we had enough. A few hundreds of Naira did not hurt that much, so we did not feel like we are dropping anything.
It did not seem to last for a very long time. Although we won a few times but that will be true only if we didn't count the times we lost. It became an addiction. We became persistent hoping to win at all cost. My life suddenly became a tragedy, a script of a sad writer. What I thought to be a means of living actually made me lost everything. I lost my money, my joy, my comfort, my peace... You just name it. My friend always told me my country is bad. We spend all day long either condemning the government or any other thing.  A lot of opportunities we could have explored passed us by because we were pessimistic. We never for once saw anything good about anything in life. We always believed that this earth is unfair to us. Justice is what we believe is far away from us because nothing seems to work out for us.

But I think we have been getting it all wrong. Because I still see some of my friends who are actually making it well. These same people were the ones I once thought this earth was unjust to. So I have actually got it all wrong. The weather is never always favourable to some set of persons. What really matters is how they view the world. I could have seen the world in their view but I was myopically restricted by the type of friend I kept. Until I was able to remove this out of my life as the lens I used in viewing things.  Not until then did I realize how powerful relationships can be.

Friends you keep can keep you from achieving anything in life. Those you move with will ultimately determine your movement to destiny. Determine today and break wrong relationships from your life.