Every man for himself

Something happened yesterday, something I wasn't entirely in support of but got to learn a lesson from it.

_{Photo by Thao LEE}

You see, I live in an hostel where the rooms are so close to one another that you literally could hear all of your neighbours business, even that of which you absolutely don't want to hear. And living in an hostel with about forty rooms, there's one problem you're bound to face, gossips.

And that's because everyone tends to know when you're having a guests, when they're coming in and when they're leaving. They know who your girlfriend/boyfriend is and who you're having an affair with. Now, your neighbours having this information is no problem, because it's none of their business but it becomes a problem when they start to gossip about it and even tell lies just to make the gossips juicy to their listeners.

A couple of times I've heard really crazy things about my close friend and each time we hear something new, we get shocked as to how well the stories were fabricated or twisted to make it more interesting than what the original story really was. And of course the majority of us have an idea of the group of people who do this gossip but unfortunately, the reason why we haven't acted on it is because we haven't caught them in the act, all we have are hearsay.

Well yesterday, while I was in my room minding my business, my phone had rang, it was my friend calling me and asking me to rush downstairs because apparently, two ladies were about to engage in a brawl. So I had done as he said, I had rushed downstairs and just as I was getting there, the boyfriend of one of the ladies came out of his hostel, holding a mopstick, and then proceeded to hit the other lady multiple times with it, everywhere.

He had applied so much force that the stick had broken into three piece, then he had picked one of the broken pieces and held it the same way you would hold a knife that you're about to stab someone with, that was when myself along with some other guys had proceeded to hold him and took it from him.

He tried to wiggle and struggle out of our grasp but the guys held him tight while I held the weapon and then he proceeded to threaten us, he had said he would burst my stomach if I didn't unhand him. It was a pretty weird and funny threat because this was the first time someone was opting to attack my stomach instead of my pretty face.

Well, we finally got him to calm down and I left the scene and went up when I could see the whole thing from a much clearer and safer distance. It was at my new location that I began to hear what had happened. Apparently the lady everyone was attacking was a gossiper, a chronic one. She would gossip about anyone and anything and she had said some really nasty things about that guy, things he said could have ended his relationship with his girlfriend, things that weren't true and that was why he was that upset.

Immediately I heard all of that, I believed it because I also knew the lady to be gossiper. I've sat right next to her on multiple occasions and heard her gossip about a lot of people with another friend of hers, a friend that I saw gently seated in a corner while all of this beating was taking place. This same friend began to laugh at the whole situation after the lady who was beaten had left.

Of course I didn't say anything because there was nothing to be said, but looking at that friend pretending to not be a part of the problem and not even saying anything to defend her partner in crime made me get a deeper meaning to the saying "every man for himself"..

That was when I knew that that lady didn't get that humiliated because she was the worse gossip in the area, she was just unlucky to be the one that was caught and dealt with because the last time I checked, you need someone to gossip with, a partner. And yet, she was the only one who was humiliated and made to look like a nobody.

I had mixed reaction about the whole thing because at one hand I felt she got what she deserved because some of this gossips has done a lot of harm to a lot of people but on the other hand, seeing just her getting punished when there was a lot of them standing there who were her gossip partners made the whole thing feel unfair to me and left a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

And as for the other lady's boyfriend, I was shocked he even went that far to hit her with a stick and threatened to stab her with it. He probably should have left the fight for the ladies to handle because there were more than four girls who wanted a pound of flesh from that one lady that day.

And errmmm...this probably isn't important but he later came to apologise later that evening, not to me of course, but to my big stomach, yeah, the same one he had threatened to burst.. Lol