The following morning arrived slowly, as if unsure of itself. Dawn crept into Akin's room with muted courage, filtering through dusty blinds in thin, delicate lines. He sat on the edge of his bed, watching particles float like tiny galaxies suspended in air. He wondered not for the first time if human beings were just like these particles: drifting, illuminated only when light happened to fall on them.
There was something different about the air today. He felt it before he understood it. A pull. A quiet summons. A sense that the world outside was preparing to show him something he had overlooked for years.
He stepped out of his apartment and into the noise of the city. Lagos in the morning was a wild mosaic honking buses, hawkers shouting prices, exhaust fumes rising like reluctant spirits. But beneath the chaos, Akin sensed another city hiding underneath the visible one. A city not made of cement, but of meaning. A city built on the bones of dreams and the light of consciousness.
The philosophers would say reality has layers: the physical, the mental, the spiritual, and the symbolic. Most people live only in the first two layers. Akin, unwillingly or not, was drifting into the third.
As he walked toward the bus stop, everything felt strangely heightened. The chatter of women selling fruits. The rustle of newspapers. The laughter of children chasing a worn-out football. These weren't just sounds anymore they were signals. Symbols. Echoes of something larger.
He boarded a danfo, squeezing beside strangers whose lives he would never know. The air inside was thick and carried a faint scent of sweat, dust, and cheap perfume. But Akin wasn't focused on the discomfort. His mind had drifted into its usual territory: the metaphysical.
Why does the world feel different when nothing external has changed? he wondered.
A man sitting opposite him muttered something under his breath something about God's timing and the wickedness of men. Akin didn't react, but the words clung to him.
God's timing.
A concept that once felt comforting, now felt ambiguous. Philosophers argued that time itself is an illusion an endless loop of moments pretending to be a straight line. If that were true, then God's timing wasn't something humans should be waiting for. It was something unfolding everywhere, all at once.
Maybe meaning was always present people just didn't always have the eyes to see it.
The bus rattled violently as it sped down the highway, and Akin's attention drifted to the passengers around him. A woman held a baby whose eyes stared into nothingness, as if seeing through worlds. A middle-aged man clutched a Bible with tired hands, whispering scriptures between breaths. A young girl sat by the window, doodling stars and planets on her school notebook.
Each of them carried a universe within. Each of them was a city built from memories, beliefs, fears, and the invisible architecture of inner worlds.
Akin found himself thinking: Maybe humanity is just a constellation of walking cities. Some built on hope. Others on survival. Some on pain. Others on dreams.
And some like him were cities currently under reconstruction.
The bus came to a halt near the island, and Akin stepped out. The skyline ahead shimmered in sunlight glass towers, distant cranes, and the silent promise of modern ambition. Yet beneath that physical city, he imagined another one. A symbolic one. A city made not of glass but of clarity, not of concrete but of consciousness.
He walked toward the water's edge, where vendors sold roasted plantain and fishermen prepared their boats. The sea was restless, waves striking the shore like a heartbeat too eager to be contained.
Akin closed his eyes.
For a moment, he felt everything the weight of his uncertainties, the echoes of his mind, the strange beauty of the world, the tension between hope and disillusionment. And within that mixture, a quiet thought formed.
The hardest realities are not the ones outside. They are the ones that confront us within.
Maybe that was why life felt confusing lately. Not because reality was cruel, but because truth was trying to break old illusions. Growth was painful. Transformation even more so. Philosophers called it the cracking of the shell. Mystics called it awakening. Psychologists called it identity shift. But the experience felt the same no matter the label.
Akin opened his eyes.
In the distance, the city glowed harsh yet beautiful, chaotic yet meaningful. A kaleidoscope of contradictions. Much like the human mind.
He breathed in deeply.
Something was calling him deeper. Into himself. Into truth. Into a version of reality he had never explored.
The journey had already begun.