I am not a superstitious kind of person, and so I don’t pay any particular attention to "signs of things that might happen”. But I do employ a more than normal amount of common sense, which to some people might make me look like am a coward. But we are all cowards to some extent.

So, after nearly staying awake all night in my new room, listening to the comings and goings of my new neighbours, I was almost running wild with fatigue.

I had run away from my previous house because of thugs, but now I was realizing that I might have jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

From what I had gathered in the few hours I had been in my new house, I was in trouble; I couldn’t understand why people would keep moving in and out of a house the whole night.

I tried to count how many people there were in that house, just by listening to the sound of their footsteps, and I managed to count about sixteen before I gave up.

There were probably more than twenty people living in a house of two rooms.

I was supposed to be concerned, but I was too tired to be really worried.

So, as I sat and weighed my options, I must have fallen asleep, something I hadn’t thought I would be capable of doing for at least two weeks.

When I woke up in the morning, it was bright light, and just the way I wished the night would be; deathly quiet.

The house next to mine was silent; there was not even a single person in sight.

I assumed all those men who had been walking in the night must have gone, but I later learnt that they were simply sleeping.

Yeah, they slept during the day, and moved or worked, or did whatever they did for a living, at night. Don’t ask me what they did for a living, because I wasn’t sure, and anyway, I guess it shouldn’t be that hard to guess.

I locked my door and went off to work. I was late, but I was too stressed to really care about the boss giving me a hard time. Luckily, he wasn’t in when I entered, so I simply walked in and sat at my desk.

I avoided the late coming grilling, and also why my clothes weren’t ironed! Two hours later, I was soundly asleep on my desk.

I don’t even know at what point it happened, because at one point I remember doing my work, then the next minute, someone was tapping me on the shoulder telling me to wake up. It was my boss!

From the look of my clothes, he must have figured out something wasn’t right with me because he didn’t ask me what I was doing sleeping at ten o’clock in the morning. Instead, he told me to go back home and see him the next day in the morning.

When I reached home, I had a big surprise waiting for me. Really, I should have expected it, not with the kind of neighbours I had.

My door was wide open, and everything in my house was gone!

I had left the door locked, and the padlock was still there. The door had been opened from the hinges!! The house was so empty it was like I had never lived there.

There wasn’t even a spoon in the place! Meaning that, I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, because the bed had been taken too.

Thankfully, I had too much sleep in my head to realize the meaning of my new status. I called my mother, (yeah, I called my mother, so what?), told her I needed a place to sleep and went back to my home. Sure, east or west, home is truly best. I slept like a baby.

Ends