Consequences of our actions

The hardest form of apology to give are those where you didn't really offend anyone directly but your body language and attitude did and now you don't even know if it's right for you to apologise for what you never actually did.

_{Photo by John Bussell}

I have this friend of mine who we always gather at his room every night to play video game. At my hostel, when it comes to playing video games like soccer, we all come together with the resources we have to make it work, so one person has the controllers we use, while someone else has the laptop and then we all go to someone else's room (the one guy who turns on his generator almost every night) to play the game because aside from the fact that he has electricity, he also has a television that we connect the laptop to in other to watch the game on a much more bigger screen.

Now this guy, the one with the television always acts like someone who's bipolar, today he's happy we're all gathered in his room laughing and gisting while enjoying our game and the next day he's not happy that we're there. I get it that people get mood swings every now and then and it's normal but trust me when I say there's nothing normal about this guy's moodswing because it doesn't happen once in a while, it happens all the time.

And it got to a stage where everyone just started getting irritated by his behaviour because it slowly was started to feel like an insult because he began to complain about everything, if you knocked on his door, he would complain of you either not knocking loud enough or your knock being too loud. And then he complains about us being on his bed, even though that is the same spot we all sit on everyday. And then there are some days where he just goes and turn off the game because he's "tired of playing" .. Mind you, he's not the only one playing, we would be like three other guys in the room, waiting for it to get to our turn to play.

Well, it was only a matter of time before we all eventually got fed up and I personally decided to place self-respect above my love for video games, so I made a promise to myself not to go to his room anymore. Unknown to me, the rest of the guys had also taken the same decision and now, he feels so lonely and wonders why we no longer come to his room like we used to.

Of course he didn't say anything to us (I never expected him to) but his behaviour says it all. I personally have come to notice that whenever he feels lonely and bored and wants us to come visit him, he comes to our room to tell us about the football match he plans on watching in his room later that day, or the game he plan on playing, that is his way of telling us that he would be playing some video game that night and he wants us to come play with him.

We know all of his signs but we choose to ignore it, maybe to teach him a lesson on how to treat people better next time. It's far more better for him to tell us at the door that he doesn't feel like playing video games that day, rather than let us walk into his room and then treat us like assholes who have no home of our own.

I honestly don't know if he knows that we're boycotting him at the moment but the sad thing is that even if he does, I doubt he would be able to talk to any of us about it because for one, he's a guy and we don't really apologise to our fellow guys (especially for things like this), we just look for some other way to squash the beef (even though there isn't any beef to squash here), and to be honest, everything he did was within his right, his room too.