Akin's nights had recently become louder than his days. Not because of generators or night traders or far-off music drifting through cracked windows those were normal. Predictable. Manageable.
The noise he struggled with came from within.
Thoughts that once walked calmly through his mind now ran wild, tripping over each other, demanding attention. Some were old companions: You're destined for something… your life is bigger than this. Others were newer and far less comforting: What if you're wrong? What if destiny is just a story people tell to survive disappointment?
The mind is a strange place. It stores voices you thought you forgot. It resurrects fears you believed you outgrew. And sometimes, it whispers truths you're not quite ready to hear.
Akin lay on his bed that night, staring at the ceiling fan spinning unbothered above him. The air felt warm, thick, almost spiritual like the kind of atmosphere prophets described before visions. But no visions came. Only echoes.
He remembered something his grandfather once told him: "When reality grows heavy, the spirit starts speaking in symbols." Akin didn't understand it then, but he felt it now. The confusion he battled didn't feel random. It felt purposeful, like a storm sent not to destroy him, but to reveal something hidden.
Yet revelation can feel like madness before it becomes clarity.
His phone buzzed beside him. A message from his friend Kelechi.
Kelechi: Guy, you good? You've been ghosting everybody.
Akin stared at the message for almost a minute before typing back.
Akin: I'm fine. Just thinking.
Kelechi: About life? Or about destiny?
Akin paused. Everyone knew him too well.
Akin: Both, I guess.
Kelechi: Omo, thinking too much no good o. Sometimes you don't need answers. Just rest.
Akin smiled faintly. Kelechi was practical annoyingly practical. The type who believed that life became simpler when you didn't overanalyze it. Akin admired him for that, but he didn't work that way. His mind didn't give him permission to rest.
He dropped the phone and turned on his side. Shadows formed shapes on his wall indistinct, shifting, mysterious. He found himself wondering why the human mind can create entire universes out of darkness. Why the unknown holds so much power over the heart.
It struck him then: maybe reality wasn't the enemy. Maybe it was the teacher. And hope wasn't a trap maybe it was a compass, but one that sometimes pointed through deserts before leading to water.
The thought brought a brief moment of relief.
But relief, like hope, was slippery.
Minutes later, the inner noise returned questions, doubts, half-formed revelations. Yet something about them felt different tonight. They no longer sounded like confusion. They sounded like echoes. Echoes of a voice he had not yet fully recognized.
Akin closed his eyes.
And in the thick silence of the night, he felt it again the subtle stirring, the inner shift, the invisible invitation.
His mind was trying to tell him something.
He just didn't know what.