This is kind of a crude love story where the ending is not told at the end because frankly, we are still monitoring this relationship.

I was talking to a friend of mine, about how human beings have this incessant need to do the opposite of what we are told. 

Even when you aren’t particularly a person that likes being outdoors, the moment someone places a restriction on that, you develop an urge to go discovering, your feet itches to escape the wall you have been imprisoned in. 

Suddenly, being indoors is suffocating.

Imagine, the way you become uncomfortable seeing flies drop the moment poison has entered their interior and clobbered everything. 

Picture a field, wherein instance flowers that strived into the air lost their spine wallowed down to the earth. 

A combined number of things that just failed to function due to a particular reason all at the same time, is unsettling, unnerving.  It is just distressing. We would all agree on that, I guess.

Now, why is it so hard to see a virus that is annihilating the crippled, donkey ridding the masses and tiptoeing like weeds into any known surface, and some people are still nonchalant.

I saw someone that said, “we are all going to die at some point so why is everyone so scared at this moment in time.” I wanted to respond but I realised being asthmatic, each breath was too precious to be wasted arguing with insolent minds. 

Yes, in the end, death is inevitable, but what is evitable is being told that this could kill you, but if you did this, your death can be prevented for now.  

So, I ask, is it cruelty or ignorance to hear another death, an increase in numbers, and still shrug your shoulder, and walk mindlessly into a den where death lingered, where you could have masked yourself and washed the walls that were tainted?

I said that this was a toxic love story! Well in the most satirical way, COVID is that man that your mother warned you about, told you to sanitise yourself off everything and anything he said, keep a safe distance from him because, in the end, he will ruin you and leave you lifeless.

For most of us that knew sense wasn’t something you buy but something you had, we listened and followed our mothers’ instructions because stupidity wasn’t engraved in us. 

However, there are those that get blinded by the novelty of COVID, the fact that he has travelled around the world, leaving vulnerable individuals dropping dead at its sight, thus for them, they left their ears behind when being told COVID is dangerous, like a child without guidance, it will not learn until it has experienced for itself the torments that will be infused into its system when COVID takes over. 

It will not learn until COVID has entered their homes intoxicating their systems with its fuses and then they will blame everyone but themselves for not making them listen properly the first time.

But as they are playing the blame game, suffocation is tolling in and paying its respect to inner walls. 

No wonder, we said say some love stories are fatal, and what makes it worse is that there are still those that see COVID, and do not run as fast as their legs can carry them into the chambers of disinfection and isolation before it’s too late.  

What will we make of them? We cannot leave them to wonder, because their choices affect our health no matter how prepared and strongly we safeguard our walls.

By Fatou Mbenga