Since childhood I've always had nyctophobia. Though I do try to respect my gradual increase in age and maturity, darkness is still one of my greatest phobias. This is probably because I lost my Dad at an early age and the community we lived in didn't have a power supply, so we always had dark nights whenever we ran out of fuel. I was always afraid of seeing my Dad's ghost in the dark and since then, I've always had that fear that there's something hiding in the dark.
For the meantime, I live with my brother and his family. In April, my brother and his family had to travel for a series of occasions in my hometown. This travel kept them far from home for three weeks and since I was still writing exams and couldn't travel with them, I had to live in the house alone. They left me with some food items to sustain me but that wasn't my biggest burden. I was still wondering how I would survive dark nights. But luckily for me, I remembered one of my friends who lived in the school hostel, Etima.
I called Etima and asked him to come stay with me for that period before my brother and his family returned. He was even happy to leave the hostel which he described as “uncomfortable hell on earth.”
In the morning when he arrived, we had some tea and that served as our breakfast for the day before we left home to hang out with friends.
At night, we had to cook something to eat. We didn't want to eat what was in the fridge so we contributed money and purchased spaghetti and the condiments needed to prepare it. When we asked for the price of the spaghetti, one was 1000 naira while the other was 1,200 naira, just 200 naira difference.
Guess what, we quickly went for the cheaper one without considering the quality after cooking. We joined heads and cooked spaghetti. Sadly, the food was bad, the quality was poor and the spaghetti which was supposed to be tasty and separated was gummy and lacked taste even after absorbing all the condiments we used. We tried to manage it but we couldn't.
So what text? We had to contribute money again to go get some condiments for rice. We decided to try rice since spaghetti didn't turn out well. Since I had rice already at home, we just bought the condiments needed and made a white rice and sauce/stew.
The rice and sauce was so delicious that we almost finished the quantity we never believed we could finish. That was just the first day he visited and we already had such unforgettable memories of wasting food, money and energy just because we chose quality over price.
Since that day I learned to always choose quality over quantity as well as price.
We both doubted our abilities to cook egg stew/sauce but the result turned out perfect. That was my first night with What an unbelievable day!
Thanks friends for checking up on my post. This remains my entry for the #neoxianprompts, writing prompt number #31. To participate, check out the post link:
@neoxianprompts/neoxian-city-writing-prompt-31
All images are mine😊.