Secrets are a major foundation of today's civilization. Many kingdoms, families and friendships have been built as well as destroyed due to the ability or inability to keep secrets.
It's actually one of the few things you can say openly say you're sure that everyone around has. I have a few of them myself the same way I'm sure many of y'all reading do also.
My favorites are those movies where one spy from one country discovers a secret about another country and every intelligence agency is trying to find him before the whole world discovers it. Lol, I'm already digressing from my main post.
Keeping a secret can be very hard especially if it involves something serious and the person involved is someone close to you. We sometimes judge a persons strength of will by how trustworthy they are at keeping secrets.
I've had my own share of secrets over the years but one of the toughest one I had to keep was on a new year Eve when I got a call from home.
I was in school then with my cousin and because of distance as well as security issues, we decided to stay back instead of traveling home for the holidays.
I was sleeping when a call came in from my mum, it was the news of my grandma's death. She'd been battling with health issues for awhile and from previous calls, it looked like she was getting better.
There's this shock you get when you get a bad news immediately after waking up. I was in a state of disbelief for the first few minutes.
A glance to my cousin still sleeping and oblivious to the news and i was confused on whether to wake him up and break the news or wait till later.
One of the reasons was that he was in his second year and his first year hadn't gone as he'd expected. Dropping that kind of news could have negative effects.
I didn't have to wait long because he somehow sensed I was awake and was soon up himself.
I realized then that as much as I was trying to do something good, I wouldn't have appreciated it if our roles were reversed. Besides it wasn't really my secret to keep and he had every right to know about the situation.
My mum expected me to tell him after she called, so it was really just me overthinking the situation instead of focusing on what was happening.
By focusing on whether to inform my cousin or not, I was somehow trying to avoid thinking about the fact that I wouldn't see my grandma anymore.
I told him what had happened and the funny thing is my cousin hissed and told me I was saying rubbish and then proceeded to sleep back. I didn't realize when I started laughing even though I was hurting inside.
He just couldn't believe grandma was gone and the only logical explanation to him was that I was somehow saying nonsense.
I probably should've waited till morning before telling him, but it wasn't my secret to keep.
All images used are mine