Chapter One – The Purple Jar
The power cut out just as the rain began. Lagos nights were never truly silent — there was always a horn blaring, a hawker shouting, a generator rumbling somewhere down the street — but inside Adanna's small room, the sudden darkness swallowed everything.
She lit a candle, its flame quivering against walls plastered with glossy faces. Seven boys smiled down at her from the posters, their stares frozen but alive enough to make her heart ache. Eclipse7. Her universe, her compass.
And right there, in the middle of her desk, sat a glass jar. Coins. Crumpled notes. Even a faded dollar bill someone had once handed her for change. Across the glass, written in purple marker, were the words that had carried her for years:
"The Purple Jar."
She dropped in a coin, the sound loud in the stillness.
Almost there.
Her friends had laughed when she first told them her dream. Seoul? To see Eclipse7 live? Adanna, abeg, don't be delusional. But every coin in that jar was a refusal to give up. She wasn't chasing a silly fantasy. She was chasing oxygen.
Her eyes drifted to the battered notebook tucked under her pillow. It wasn't a diary. It wasn't a journal. It was her secret — a collection of letters she would never send. Letters written to the one boy whose voice had carried her through every heartbreak and every long night shift: Jinwoo, Eclipse7's golden voice.
She opened the latest page, her heart tightening as she reread the messy words:
> Dear Jinwoo, today the rain leaked through our roof again. Mama cried, but your song kept me steady. Do you know what it feels like when a stranger becomes your lifeline? If you do… I hope someone reminds you that you're not alone either.
Her cheeks warmed. Ridiculous. If anyone found out, she'd die of shame. Yet every time she wrote, it felt like he might somehow hear her.
The rain outside thickened, drumming against the window. Adanna hugged her knees, staring at the shadows dancing across the walls.
One day.
One day she would stand in a sea of purple light sticks, screaming until her throat gave out. One day she would see Jinwoo not as a picture on her wall but as a living, breathing man under the same sky.
And deep down, in the part of her heart she never dared to admit aloud, she whispered a secret even the walls couldn't know:
What if he saw me too?
The candle flickered low. Adanna closed her eyes, clutching her notebook to her chest. Outside, the city roared, alive and unbothered. But inside her tiny room, something bigger than Lagos pulsed in the dark — a dream so impossible, it felt dangerous.
And tomorrow, she would discover ju
st how close impossible dreams could be.