The Prince

The Prince in Royal Agbada (Joshua Ziregbe)

I found a new world recently, I think it’s in another realm, or maybe it’s in ours but just on a different planet, or maybe it's on earth in our very oceans, I'm not sure. It’s a world like nothing I have ever seen before, yet it feels so familiar. 

Submerged beings that share our very nature, every feature of our human condition, replicated. I had hoped this world would be different, that they would have found answers to all of life’s important questions, that they would be so advanced that life here would be a paradise. My hopes were dashed because all they had managed to acquire with all their advancement were more questions.

I looked around and saw beauty thriving in the face of turmoil, in the same way you could look up to the sky holding the hand of your lover, thinking ‘what a beautiful world’ while someone, somewhere looking at the same sky would only weep and mourn.

"We see as far as we can feel", she tells me. I look at her thinking that maybe her species is blind but then she looks back and I realize what she meant: we only concern ourselves with the things that affect us.

Beaconing, "Come and see, come and see", like the lyrics to a quintessential Nigerian church song, I flowed up to meet her at the top of a building, a structure situated atop an underwater volcanic vent, it seemed to be on the verge of melting. Boiling water was everywhere and in this heat the monarchs thrived.

I saw The Prince.

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