At Your Peril

Our choices put together, form our personality. You may damn the consequences when the effects of a particular attitude is not showing at the moment but in the long run, one may bite hard in their lips for not yielding to the advice earlier given to them.

I once shared how I journey into smoking when unjustly got admission into the university. At that time, there are so many influences that if you do not consider your background and how it all started for you, one may be easily swept off his or her feet.

From one stick a day, I graduated into taking several sticks of cigarette and not being able to quench my thirst for it. At some point, my friend was already taking hemp but I knew from the beginning I won't survive that, so I didn't try tasting that.

To smoke hemp, they would have to go out of the school premises into the hood where some locals would provide them weeds and they would pay. But they dare not try smoking hemp with the fence of the school.

One day, when they gathered at the hood as usual to smoke, they were raided by the special task force against robbery. I knew my friends too, they wouldn't have attempted to go into such an act as robbery.

Unknowing to them, the boys in the hood are professional robbers. Any time they have a big kill, they'd throw some kind of party, with girls from higher institutions around in attendance. And you know, were those ladies flocks, guys would like to come to see if they would catch.

After the guys were raided and taken into police custody, the report that we fetched from the investigation was so complex.

They were involved in multiple crimes. From child trafficking to the commercial sale of Indian hemp, to gun-running, kidnapping, and robbery. I just couldn't stand it. My friends, Chris and Dan are going to be paraded as criminals. To make matters worse, we lived in the staff quarters. Dan's father was the registry of the institution. It was such a big case.

When the issue was reported to the student union government (that was when unionism was it) the SUG president swung into action. The regime thought that since the students were not caught with any evidence indicating that they are robbers nor is their name mentioned by the syndicate, then they should be discharged and acquitted.

The SUG body consulted with the Commit of the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and provided the innocent students, my friends with an attorney from the agency.

On the day of the court case, the whole school bombarded the court area, waiting patiently outside the courtroom for the judgment.

After all, was said and done, they were discharged and acquitted.

I learned a lesson that period. Even though I didn't quit smoking after the incident, learned to know it is I do business with and what other things he does.

Months later, Dan's requested that after that semester, he wants us all out of his apartment at the staff quarters. I understand how shameful it could be when you have a child who is always dragging the family name in the mud. This time around, it is not only your biological children, children of people you don't know.

After several appeals, with a promise never to engage in any such acts that would endanger our lives or that of our neighbors.

Then, the last straw that breaks the camel back happened. Chris developed a strange kind of cough. It was so severe that he would start to secret blood from his nostril. That was one of the most dreaded times inflated while I was in school. The guy had caught tuberculosis. And had to stay away from public domain. He missed school for one and a half sessions and wouldn't be graduating with us.

Then for me, I have seen the life of a smoker, how it ends. I needed no one to preach to me. I stopped smoking and that was some them years ago, I never looked back.

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