Hi everyone in the weekend community! This week's topics are very interesting and I appreciate for his insights. Because I’m not sure I would have had the chance to share this childhood story with a wider audience.
I have told several people about it, whenever the topic of snakes comes up, this is because the memories of my childhood adventures are still very clear in my head like they happened yesterday.
I’m always excited about telling this story but my problem is that you may never believe me, no one has, except Liberty, my cousin. And he only believes because he was with me that day.
I’m sure I wasn't born with a fear of snakes and spiders because at the age of seven, all the animals I could see were my friends and I always looked forward to seeing them in the village. The fear began when my aunty told me snakes are very poisonous, and that they could shrink a man and swallow him alive. I guess this was all to stop us from going into the woods and she succeeded because I started having strange dreams about snakes pursuing me and my cousin. I developed an extreme fear that almost turned into a phobia.
Unlike my childhood, I can’t stand any snakes not even the smallest one, not even worms, anything that looks like a snake. Everything about them now is creeping scary including thinking about them.
Like I said earlier, these feelings came after my aunt's instructions and her stories about snakes.
I didn’t hate snakes, I always look forward to seeing them whenever I’m in the village. I used to have this feeling of seeing snakes whenever I was walking on a bush track on a hot afternoon (as it is normal for them to come out from holes to feel the sunshine), what I’d just do is stand still and look around, and I’m sure going to see one or two.
The back gate of my grandparent's house is opened into the woods. I can’t remember being warned not to go into the woods until I told my aunty about the big snake we saw. That day it was just me and my cousin, I guess we were both weird and fearless, we loved the reptiles in the woods more than the cartoons in the sitting room. So on this day, I saw a big black snake in the middle of a bamboo thicket, it didn’t run from me as usual so I squatted down to have a closer look at it. It has this pair of beautiful and deceptive eyes I couldn’t forget till today. I stared at it for some time until my cousin came around.
No one at home except my cousin took me seriously when I told them that a snake looked at me with love eyes, as that was the only word I knew then that could perfectly describe the eyes. I can remember taking my cousins back there several times to check if I’d see the snake again.
I have seen snakes countless times. I've even seen two black snakes fighting (can't tell if they were fighting or playing, but one was bigger than one and my cousin identified the smaller one as male and the bigger one as female).
He was just 10 (three years older than me), and so was too young to kill a snake, so we only took to our heels because why would you even kill a snake in the woods? It's their territory, right?
Well, all this was in the past because now I
should be very scared of snakes though I haven’t seen any for some years now, and I do not wish to see it except in the zoo.
And spiders, I haven’t seen them much and I don't think I have any problem with their existence.
Well, I can't really remember all that happened then, these are just the most eventful ones. I hope you enjoyed reading it.
That will be all for today, thanks for your time.