Guilty Conscience

Have you ever been in a situation where you remember something that happened to you in the past and just cringe? Well I've been having a lot of those lately. In as much as I tried to be on my best behavior when growing up as a kid, there were few situations when I did certain things that I'm really not proud of. And recently, there have been one particular event that has been playing over and over again in my head that I just can't seem to shake off or forget, no matter how hard I try to.

_{Photo by Elimende Inagella}

Here in Nigeria, when we want to make phone calls but don't have airtime to make the call, we go buy something we call recharge cards to recharge the airtime and be able to make the call. We also have four main cell services in the country and when recharging, you have to buy the exact recharge card for a particular network for it to work, you can search "Nigerian recharge card" for better understanding and pictures too.

So on this particular day, my mom had asked me to go to this lady who sells recharge card who also is a friend of my mom to buy recharge card. When I returned from the lady's shop, my mom had asked me to send the recharge card codes to her brother who needed the airtime but just as I sent the recharge codes, we realized that I had mistakenly gotten a different network from the one I needed, so she had asked me to return the recharge card (airtime) and get it replaced with the right network.

Now usually, the people in the recharge card business do not like it when people return their cards because they don't know if it has been used or not because there's no way to tell unless they try making use of the card themselves which they wouldn't want to do to avoid losing money, but because this lady was a friend, she had decided to change the recharge card with no questions asked and I had immediately sent the right recharge card to my mom's brother.

But then the next day, I got this stupid idea to try loading the first recharge card codes that I had sent to my uncle, the same recharge card I had returned but still had the numbers of the card on my mom SMS because I had initially sent it to my uncle. I remember telling myself that the lady must have sold the card and the person must have already used it, but to my surprise, after inputting the digits on my phone, the airtime worked.

I immediately got scared but couldn't tell anyone because the last thing I wanted was to get in trouble for something like that. And now for some weird reason, that particular event keeps on playing over and over in my head, popping up at random times and making me feel bad for what I did those many years ago.