365 DAYS AROUND THE SUN

The morning in Lagos is already loud and alive. From the keke napep I boarded just outside my house, to the bustling BRT terminal up ahead, everything is moving — horns blaring, danfo buses weaving through traffic, and street vendors pacing the sidewalks with baskets of gala, groundnuts, and chilled water balanced on their heads. I’m half-awake, absorbing it all. No, it’s not December 31st. It’s not my birthday. It’s just a random Thursday — May 22nd, 2025. But for some reason, today feels reflective. A line from a Kojey Radical song pops into my head: “Spent another 365 around the sun.” And it hits me like a wave.

Sitting in the BRT, window slightly cracked, I let the thought linger: 365 around the sun? The sun itself doesn’t move — it’s the Earth that does. Constantly spinning, rotating at over 1,000 miles per hour, while orbiting the sun at an even more mind-blowing speed. That means somewhere on Earth, at every second, the sun is shining. And if it’s dark in Lagos, it’s bright in Tokyo or Rio or Cape Town. This means no point on Earth is ever fully dark or fully bright at the same time — there’s always a mix, a balance. Day and night are never separate; they’re just phases of one spinning motion. If you followed a single ray of sunlight all the way around the world, you'd eventually end up back where you started. And in a way, you’d never leave the circle of light. It’s like we’re all part of one giant loop, and each “365” is not a finish line — it’s a return.

That loop makes me wonder. I've heard stories — maybe myths — that no human has ever truly traveled around the world end to end, from pole to pole or edge to edge. That it’s “impossible.” Some people tried and never returned. Not because the Earth ends, but because it just... keeps going. Like there's no end to reach. Maybe we don't really know what the edge of Earth looks like — or if there even is one. I’ve also heard explorers say that the deeper you go into the unknown, the more questions you find. Sometimes, the more you try to map the world, the more it expands.

Then I remember this old sci-fi movie I watched years ago: The Thirteenth Floor (1999). In it, a man discovers his whole reality is a computer simulation. He starts noticing weird glitches, and when he drives to the very edge of his world, the scenery breaks down into a crude wireframe — like unfinished graphics in a video game. It’s how he realizes everything around him — the people, the city, even himself — is just code, running on someone else’s machine. And yet, all his feelings, emotions, and experiences felt real. That moment — where he reaches the "end" and sees the truth — has stayed with me.

And now here I am, in Lagos traffic, wondering: What if we’re also part of something bigger we can’t fully see? What if the sun we follow, the birthdays we celebrate, the everyday things we accept as normal… what if they’re just patterns in a larger system? What if our world isn’t fully mapped, and what we call “reality” is just one layer of it?

So maybe the lyric isn’t just poetic. “Another 365 around the sun” isn’t only about age or time passing. It’s a subtle reminder that we’re on a journey — orbiting, spinning, looping — and the world we think we know might still hold surprises, questions, and corners we’ve never explored.

As I step off the BRT and into the bustle of Ikeja, danfo horns echo in the air and the vendors are already shouting out prices for puff-puff and cold drinks. The sun is out, bright and hot. It hits my face like a welcome.

And I’m left with this thought:
If every year we circle the sun, if no one has seen the true edge of the world, and if simulations can feel just as real as life… then what exactly are we living in? And how far do we have to go before we find out?