The Moment Everything Stopped
The two faint blue lines on the plastic test strip felt like a judge’s gavel coming down, sentencing me to a life I hadn't chosen. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the world outside my dorm room window at Akintola Hall was buzzing with the usual 300-level energy - students rushing to lectures, the distant, tinny bass of a Davido song from the campus radio station. But inside, where the air was thick with the scent of antiseptic and stale fear, my world had stopped. Ada was crying, her shoulders shaking silently as she sat on the edge of my lumpy mattress. I just stared at the strip in my hand, my mind a blank, roaring static composed of my father's disappointed voice, my mother's wails, and the imagined, incessant cry of a baby. Pregnant. Ada was pregnant.
Before Fear Had a Name
Before that moment, my biggest worry was Dr. Okoro’s Advanced Calculus exam, a man famously known as the "Dragon of the Engineering Faculty." Life was a predictable, comforting rhythm of lectures, late-night study sessions fueled by Indomie noodles and desperation, and weekend hangouts with my guys at the student bar, arguing about football and politics. Ada was the beautiful, steady melody in that rhythm. We had met in a 100-level chemistry lab, partners by chance and then by choice. We were "the couple," the ones everyone thought had it figured out, mapping out a future in Lagos after graduation and NYSC. We didn't....
When Reality Cracked Open
The news shattered that carefully constructed reality. Sleep became a luxury I couldn't afford, not because of books, but because of a looping nightmare of unanswerable questions. How would we tell our parents - my father a stern pastor, hers a market woman who had poured her life savings into her daughter’s education? What about school? What about money for prenatal care, let alone an actual child? Abortion was a hushed, terrifying word, a moral and financial abyss we didn’t know how to cross. My CGPA, which I had painstakingly dragged up to a 4.0, a ticket to a second-class upper and a shot at a graduate trainee program at Shell, suddenly felt like a cruel joke. I’d sit in lectures, staring at the whiteboard, but the complex formulas and theories would blur into grotesque images of diapers, baby formula, and hospital bills. Dr. Okoro’s voice would fade, replaced by the thudding of my own heart, a frantic drumbeat of panic.
Love Under Pressure
The pressure turned my relationship with Ada into a minefield. The easy laughter we shared over a shared plate of jollof rice was replaced by tense, whispered arguments behind my locked door. "What are we going to do, Ben?" she'd ask, her eyes swollen and ringed with exhaustion. My answer was always a helpless, "I don't know," which to her sounded less like confusion and more like an abdication. To her, it was a confirmation that I was a boy, not the man she needed. We fought about everything and nothing - money we didn't have, a future that was no longer ours to plan, and the suffocating weight of the secret. She accused me of being distant and cold; I accused her of being hysterical. We stopped touching, the space in my narrow bed becoming a cold, unbridgeable chasm between two people who were now strangers in the same crisis.
When the Whole Campus Knows
Campus drama was inevitable. Secrets have a short lifespan in the echo chamber of a university. Soon, the whispers started, following me like a shadow. I’d walk into the cafeteria, and conversations would dip, heads turning away as I approached. My friends tried to be supportive, but their advice was a confusing mess. Tunde urged me to "find a way" to get an abortion, while Sam preached about "manning up" and doing the "honorable thing." Some friends simply avoided me, as if my predicament was a contagious disease. I was no longer Ben, the bright engineering student; I was "the guy who knocked up Ada," a cautionary tale whispered in hostels. Ada faced a crueler version of this - the pitying stares, the sanctimonious whispers from her "Christian fellowship" roommates, and the invasive questions from girls who saw her as a fallen woman. The judgment drove a wedge between us, pushing us onto separate islands of misery.
Drowning Quietly
Balancing school with this new reality was a daily, losing battle. I’d try to read a chapter of my Fluid Mechanics textbook, but my eyes would scan the same paragraph for an hour. I’d go to the library to escape, only to be ambushed by my own thoughts, calculating the cost of a life I couldn't afford. My grades began a nosedive. I bombed a mid-term test I would have normally aced. I missed the deadline for a crucial Constitutional Law term paper because I spent the entire night holding Ada while she suffered a debilitating panic attack, her body trembling as she gasped for air. I was failing - not just as a student, but as a partner, a son, and a man. The dream of graduating with honors, securing that coveted job, and living a life of planned success was dissolving into a chaotic, terrifying mess. I was drowning in a responsibility I never asked for, and it was pulling my entire life down with it.
*Written and published by Barr. JC. Comr. Favour Adaugo*