A Little Superstition

_{Photo by Tolga Ahmetler}

When it comes to superstition, I'm sure every country has their fair share of it. There's always some crazy superstitious stories or myth. Some are so scary that even if you don't believe it to be true, you won't be stupid enough to even test it if it's true. While some of them are just so crazy that the moment you hear people talk about it, you know it's a lie, a very dumb lie.

Well, Nigeria has a couple of those, a lot actually, it just depends on what side of the country you travel to. But if there's one that I'm pretty sure is a bit universal in the country, it's the one that has to do with someone crossing your legs.

What I mean by that is when you're on the floor and someone crosses over you. Now this particular superstition has in the past few years had a lot of different curses associated with it, none of them has been proven to be true of course. The most popular one I heard as a kid was that if you get crossed by someone, you would have a tiny manhood.

For some weird reasons, this was the one I believed the most and was a little bit scared off because even though I was still a little kid back then, I knew there was nothing good about the gods switching my future manhood for a smaller one. So what I would always do if someone crosses over me was that I would stand up to shout at them and angrily ask them if they wanted me to have a tiny manhood, then I would lay down on the floor and ask them to cross back.

Somewhere in my little mind, I had believed that if crossing me would activate the curse, crossing me again would undo the curse.

It was crazy, I know. But what's even more crazy right now is that at this my current age, if someone crosses over me, the whole thought always comes back to me and I just immediately get up but I don't ask them to cross back. I just either leave the way for them to pass or I just sit up.

I know that what that simply means is that somewhere in my mind, there's still a tiny bit of my childish brain that is still scared of getting cursed.