Only God Can Judge Me

You do not want to be online when exam results are released.

Especially when they are your final year results. Suddenly your timeline is filled with posts of people thanking God for the far he has brought them. They are happy that finally they are through with the 8-4-4 system. The Muslim ones write “Alhamdulillah!” all over.

At that time you have not checked your results from the online students’ portal. This is your final year in university and you do not want them to be bad. So the butterflies in your stomach start laying maggots that immediately turn into caterpillars. The caterpillars crawl, prickling your insides. Your sitting equipment is on pins and needles. It burns down there. Your hands quivers, and instead of typing www.uonbi.ac.ke , you inadvertently find yourself typing www.amazingcollegechics.com .

Damn it!

Then the inboxes start streaming in.

“Have you reached 60 points?” That is euphemism for “Are you graduating with a second class upper or not?”

Naturally in your campus, first class honors is like dinosaurs. They are extinct. Not even the Bibles record anything of its existence. The next caliber of success is Second Class Honours, Upper Division. That is what you struggle for. First Class is already to hell and gone. You are told that as early as your first year. And by Jove, getting that 2^nd Upper is like kayaking your way through a sandstorm.

When that question pops up in your Facebook chat, you will remember how you sat the exams. It will be four months after you left campus. The memory will be foggy, so you will not be able to remember whether or not you wrote those papers well. And the selective amnesia will frustrate you. Because you will now imagine that you did not sit them well.

“Anything that can happen, will happen.” Murphy is whispering in your left ear.

There is a way you can calculate your grades to see what your points are. You will do that before checking your results. It will come to 59 points. So that means that in order to get to 60 and keep it there, you need nothing less than a B grade. And you pray to Amadioha that that B grade has very strong points to make up for the Cs and Ds you got last semester.

Your mother comes to mind.

She does not care that the lecturers in your campus drive very hard bargains with marks, as if they are packets of heroin of the first order. Fail, and you find somewhere else to live. No failures in her house. Never mind that she married a man who never went past high school.

The tension will kill you, and if you are impetuous, if you are weak, you will wet your pants when you finally open your portal. And then there they are.

A beautiful array of letters of the alphabet or several kinds. You will hate to quote socialites, but at that moment, their default setting defense to any criticism of naked photos online will assuage the grief of your dismal performance:

Only God can judge me, you will think to yourself.