I stepped outside today and the world just swallowed me.

Streets too wide, buildings too sure of themselves,

and I felt like a comma

in a city full of periods.

I put my hands together last night

and prayed like God had nobody else to listen to.

Like the sky was a phone line

and I was the only one calling.

Like seven billion people weren’t already talking

and mine was the voice He’d pick up.

Forgive me for that.

But when it gets quiet enough,

even being selfish starts to feel like faith.

Am I just a blip. A face nobody clocks twice.

A heartbeat nobody’s counting.

I looked up and asked the sky my name

and the stars just blinked,

like they’ve heard that one before.

We pray for love and it shows up bruised.

We pray for peace and it comes dressed like war.

We ask for more time

and time just keeps walking us toward the one door

none of us actually want to open.

Nothing comes without its opposite.

No sunrise without the night first.

No healing without whatever broke.

So will they remember me

when I’m still figuring myself out,

still shedding old versions of myself like clothes that don’t fit anymore?

Will they remember who I was in the back of the room

or only show up once I’ve already become somebody else?

My grandmother told me once,

hands full of more history than any book,

“The search doesn’t stop, child. You just decide when to.”

That one stayed with me.

Peace isn’t a place you get to.

It’s something you build

when you’re tired of asking and nothing’s answered yet.

You don’t stop searching because you found it.

You stop because you realize

the searching was the living.

You were already in it.

God, hear us. Not just me. All of us.

The ones talking to themselves in parking lots.

The ones who scream into pillows so the walls don’t hear.

The ones who smile all Sunday and fall apart by Monday.

The ones who forgot how to even ask anymore

but are still holding on somehow.

Bana bago.

Hear the children.

We’re still yours,

even when we wander,

even when we feel small,

even when we mistake our shadow for who we actually are.

Will they remember me?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But I’ll remember asking.

I’ll remember standing there

feeling too small to matter

and too alive to stop anyway.

Maybe God never answered in words.

Maybe He just gave me another morning

and that was the answer.

Maybe that’s the whole point.

You don’t live to be remembered.

You live full enough

that when you’re gone,

people feel the space where you used to be.

I don’t know if they’ll remember me.

But I was here.

I prayed here.

I searched here.

And if the only one who remembers

is the God I talked to

on the nights the world felt too big

and I felt too thin,

that’s enough.

Bana bago.

God heard us.

He always did.

-Neo Phetoe.

I was literally minding my business.Genuinely, peacefully, single and unbothered. Camera in hand, living the kind of life where the biggest decision of my day was which lens to use. I had rules. Not suggestions, rules. One of them being: never entertain anything romantic with a model. I was proud of that rule. Wore it like armour. It made sense, it protected me, it kept things clean and I liked clean.

Then the universe looked at everything I had carefully built and said, yeah, no. We met at a photoshoot. I was the photographer. She was in front of my lens. I was working, focused, doing what I do and then something started happening in my stomach that had absolutely nothing to do with the job. Butterflies. Not the gentle kind either. The loud, inconvenient, please not right now kind. The kind that show up at the worst possible time and refuse to leave quietly.

I kept shooting. Kept my face neutral. Kept adjusting settings like my hands weren’t slightly betraying me. Because what was I going to do, tell her? Mid-shoot? Put the camera down and say hey, I know we just met and I have a whole rule about this but something is happening and I think you should know? No. I kept it professional, kept it moving and quietly trusted that if the universe wanted something to happen, it would handle the logistics itself.

The universe, as it turns out, is very organised.We crossed paths again. Same energy, different setting and the second I saw her, something in me just settled. Not gradually. Immediately. There was no slow realisation, no internal debate, no list of pros and cons. Just a quiet, certain knowing that arrived before I even had language for it. My whole body understood before my brain had time to interfere. Energy doesn’t lie. I don’t care how that sounds to whoever is reading this. Some things exist completely outside of explanation and the only right response is to respect that and keep moving toward it.

That was the moment. I knew.

What followed was texts, phone calls, watching our favourite shows on Discord at hours that made absolutely no sense and none of it felt like effort. It just became routine without either of us deciding it would. That’s the thing nobody tells you about falling for someone. It doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it just quietly becomes your normal. One day you’re waiting for a message without realising you’ve been doing it for weeks. You pause a show because watching it alone suddenly feels wrong. You stop noticing where your day ends and the conversation begins. And then one day you look up and realise this person has become the background of your entire life and you don’t remember what it sounded like before them.

That’s when you know it’s real.Here’s what I didn’t anticipate though. It wasn’t just that I fell for her. It was who she is that keeps undoing me slowly, quietly, in ways I’m still discovering.

She is a creative. Genuinely, deeply creative and there is something about being with someone who understands that world from the inside that I cannot fully put into words. Someone who gets the obsession. The chaos. The way an idea can hijack your entire brain at 2am and hold it hostage until you do something about it. We don’t have to translate that part of ourselves to each other. We just get it. There’s a relief in that that I didn’t know I was looking for.

But then she’s also the most organised person I know and somehow that doesn’t clash, it completes. Like she has the structure I sometimes lack and I have the spontaneity she knows how to enjoy. It works in a way that feels less like compromise and more like the two of us just fitting.

She is honest. Not honest in a way that cuts, honest in a way that’s just clean. No games, no subtext you have to spend energy decoding, no saying one thing and meaning three others. She says what she means. She means what she says. And if you have ever spent time in situationships or situationship-adjacent situations where you were constantly trying to read between lines that weren’t even there, you will understand exactly how much that kind of clarity means. It is its own form of intimacy. To be told the truth, simply, without performance. To never have to wonder.

She lets me be myself. Fully. Without editing, without shrinking, without that low-level monitoring you do around people you’re not completely sure about. I don’t perform around her. I don’t manage how I come across or curate which version of me shows up. I just exist and she receives all of it and somehow gives it back to me like it’s worth something. That is rarer than most people will admit out loud.

And we communicate. Everything. The big things and the small things and the things that feel almost too small to bring up but somehow still matter. We don’t let things sit and rot quietly in the corner. We talk about it. Not because we’re perfect at it, but because we both decided early that silence wasn’t going to be how we handled things. That took intention. From both sides. I see it and I don’t take it lightly.

Now here is where it gets genuinely hard to explain to a normal person.

Half the time I don’t even need her to tell me what she wants. I just know. I feel it before she says it. There’s this awareness I have of her that doesn’t come from paying close attention, it just exists. We are interlinked in a way I cannot diagram or defend logically and I’ve fully stopped trying to. Some connections aren’t meant to be explained. They’re just meant to be honoured. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I genuinely feel for you because this is something else.

She is also, for the record, a complete crashout.

And I say that with the fullest love because so am I. So it works. Perfectly, chaotically, wonderfully. We yap endlessly. We go off. We send each other voice notes that are eight minutes long about something that could have been a sentence. We are both, individually, a lot and instead of exhausting each other we just multiply. Our conversations have no finish line and no one is ever trying to find one. She is genuinely the only person who has never once drained my social battery. Not once, not even on a tired day. Being around her doesn’t cost me anything. It gives. She is like solar power, endless and warm and self-renewing and I didn’t know a person could feel like that until I met her.

She is so colourful. I mean that in every possible way. There is a vibrancy to her that I didn’t have words for when I first felt it, I just knew something had shifted. My world before her had corners I had stopped seeing because I had gotten so used to them. Grey walls I had decorated around instead of questioning. She walked in and colonised all of it without asking. Quietly, completely, permanently. Colour just followed her in and decided to stay and now I look around at my own life and it looks different. Fuller. More alive. Like something that had been on mute got turned back up.

I could write a million articles about why I chose her.

About the creativity and the honesty and the communication and the crashout energy and the solar power and the colour that came with her. About the way she lets me exist without conditions and the way I can feel what she needs before she has to say it. About all the small things that don’t make headlines but make a life. A million articles and I would still not be finished.

But it took me a second to know why I chose her.

One second. One look. One shift in energy that landed in my chest before my brain could get involved. I broke my rule. The one I had built carefully, maintained proudly and honestly believed in.

And I would break it again. Immediately. Without a second thought.

Some rules exist to protect you until the right person arrives and makes them completely irrelevant. I wasn’t being reckless. I was just finally paying attention to something that was louder and truer than anything I had decided in advance. The universe placed her in front of my camera, let me sit with the feeling long enough to trust it and then arranged everything else with a patience I probably didn’t deserve.

Keratile wena. You were the most unexpected thing. The one I didn’t see coming, didn’t plan for and couldn’t have invented. And I wouldn’t rewrite a single frame of any of it.

-Neo Phetoe

I need to say something that is going to make some people uncomfortable and I am going to say it anyway because I am tired of the version of this conversation that tiptoes around the thing sitting in the middle of the room.

Black men are, in many ways, a mess right now. Not because of what we are. Because of what was done to us and what we then did with it. I say this not from outside looking in. I say it as someone who grew up without a male figure in the house, surrounded by women who loved me completely and could not give me the one thing only a present, whole, emotionally available man could have given me, which was the sight of what that looks like.

So I went and figured it out myself. And figuring it out yourself sounds heroic until you count the casualties.

We Are Not Okay!

There is a performance that Black men in this country have perfected and it is the performance of being fine. Of being the rock, always handling it, because the alternative, admitting that something inside is fractured, feels more dangerous than carrying the fracture quietly until it expresses itself sideways in someone else’s life.

And it always expresses itself. Pain does not disappear because you refuse to acknowledge it. It finds another door. It comes out as the drinking that starts as relaxing and becomes something your children associate with a version of you they have learned to be careful around. It comes out as rage disproportionate to the moment because the moment is not actually what the rage is about. It comes out as control, as jealousy, as the need to be the authority in every room because somewhere underneath that need is a boy who was never made to feel secure in any room at all.

The inheritance is in the body. You do not think your way out of it. You have to feel your way out and nobody taught us how to feel without it costing us something .

Growing Up Without A Map

I grew up around women. Strong, loving women who held everything together with a quiet ferocity I did not fully appreciate until I understood what they were holding and why they had to hold it alone.

They gave me everything they had. And there was still a gap.

Not their fault. The gap was not created by what they failed to give. It was created by what was taken before they had the chance. Fathers removed by systems, by poverty, by their own unresolved damage, by a country that spent decades treating Black men as bodies to be used and then seemed surprised when some of those men could not figure out how to be present in a home, how to be soft with a child, how to stay.

So you construct manhood from whatever is available. From the street. From older boys who were also constructing. You piece something together and call it yourself and sometimes it works and sometimes it fails spectacularly and you cannot always tell the difference in the moment. You learn what you should not have done by watching what it produced. You learn your own capacity for harm and that is the most disorienting lesson of all because you did not set out to harm anyone. You set out to survive. And survival, when it is the only thing you were taught, does not always know when to stop.

What We Do To The Women Who Love Us?

The women in the lives of unhealed Black men carry things that were never theirs to carry. They become emotional translators, decoding what a man means when he goes cold, when he reaches for the bottle instead of the conversation. They absorb moods. They shrink themselves in ways so practiced they forget they are doing it.

And the painful thing is that this is not happening in homes without love. It is happening in homes with real love. But love that was never taught how to be safe. Love that never learned the difference between devotion and possession, between protection and control.

I do not think these men are monsters. I think they are men who were handed a blueprint missing most of its pages and expected to build something whole from it.

But that explanation cannot be a permanent excuse. Because the women in those homes have one life. And they cannot wait for a generational healing project to complete itself.

Men Are Fucked Up. I Will Say It Plainly.

We abandon children and call it circumstance. We raise our voices in homes that should be safe and call it discipline. We are unfaithful and call it nature. We drink until we are someone else and call it unwinding. We refuse help and call it strength.

Some of this is us. Some of this is what was poured into us before we had any say. Both things are true and I refuse to choose between them.

But I also refuse to let the second truth become permanent shelter from the first. The mothers who raised us alone also carried inherited damage, also had no roadmap, also had every reason to break. And somehow many of them chose differently. Many of them broke something in themselves so their children would not have to carry it.

What are we choosing? Not what happened to us. What we are doing with what happened to us. At some point that becomes the only question that matters.

The Mentorship Shaped Hole.

So many of us never had one man, not one, who sat across from us and asked what we wanted our lives to feel like. Not what we wanted to achieve. What we wanted the inside of our lives to feel like.

What was transmitted was how to survive. How to provide. How to be hard enough that the world cannot break you.

What was not transmitted was how to be soft where softness is required. How to apologize as an actual reckoning. How to sit with a child who is hurting and offer presence instead of solutions.

I am not saying this as someone who received different transmission. I am saying it as someone who notices the gap in himself and cannot always trace where it came from. Something is missing and I am trying to understand its shape by feeling where it is not.

The Beauty That Complicates Everything.

The same community that produced these wounds produced great art . Produced the aesthetic language of our community that the whole world borrows from without credit. Produced men so instinctively creative, so rhythmically alive, that their cultural output has shaped global culture for a century.

Loxion kulcha is not a trend. It is theology. It is what happens when a people are told their culture is inferior and respond by making the most sophisticated cultural language on the continent.

You made beauty under conditions designed to stop you. Imagine what you could build in peace. If the creativity that has always been there was not constantly competing with unresolved pain for the same bandwidth. If the love you are capable of was not being rerouted into control.

The question is not whether you are enough. You have always been more than enough. The question is whether you will heal enough to let what you are capable of actually land.

I Have Never Been To Therapy!

I want to say that plainly because this piece has been asking for plainness and it would be dishonest to end it any other way.

I have written about healing with a clarity that implies I am somewhere in the middle of it. The truth is I am mostly at the beginning. Still circling the entrance. Still telling myself now is not the right time, that I am mostly fine, that what I carry is manageable. Which is what people say right up until something unmanageable happens and everyone around them pays the price.

I know what I am carrying. I know the shape of what was not given to me and what I learned in its absence and what that learning cost people who did not deserve to be where I figured things out. I know there are rooms inside me I have not entered. Not because I do not know they are there. Because knowing something is there and being willing to open the door are two completely different acts of courage and I have only managed the first one so far.

But I want children one day. I want a family. I want a home that feels like safety to everyone inside it not just on the days I am managing well but as a baseline my children never have to question. I want my son to see what a man who has done his interior work looks like. I want my daughter to grow up with a calibrated sense of what she deserves. And that calibration will come almost entirely from watching how her father treats the people around him.

Children do not learn love from what you tell them. They learn it from what they watch you do when you think the lesson is not happening.

The cycle does not have to repeat. That is what I hold onto. The cycle is not fate. It is pattern. And patterns can be interrupted. But not by willpower alone. Not by deciding to be different without understanding why you are the way you are. The decision is necessary. It is not sufficient.

That is where therapy comes in. And that is where Black men, myself included, have to be honest about the resistance. It is not really about money though money is real. It is mostly about what telling the truth about yourself to another person feels like when you have spent your entire life learning that vulnerability is a liability.

But that fear is keeping you sick. It is keeping the people who love you at a distance they did not choose. It is keeping your children from a version of you that is fully present.

Therapy is not weakness. It is what you do when you are serious about not passing the wound forward. It is the most responsible thing a man who wants a family can do before he has one.

I have not gone yet. I am saying publicly that I need to. Because saying it privately has not been enough to make me move.

If you are a Black man reading this who is also circling the entrance, I am not asking you to have it figured out. I am just asking you to consider that the child you want to raise one day deserves a father who tried. Who sat across from someone and said here is what I am carrying and I need help putting it down.

We Break The Cycle Here!

Not perfectly. Not without falling back sometimes. But here, in this generation, in this specific group of Black men tired enough of the damage to do something uncomfortable about it, we decide the inheritance changes.

Not for our fathers who did not get the chance. For our children who have not arrived yet but are already waiting on the other side of the work we choose to do now.

Black boy fly. Not because you are fixed. Because you deserve to before everything is.

That is enough to start. That has always been enough to start.

The cycle ends with the man who decides he is tired of it. Be that man.

-Neo Phetoe

photographed by .

(play the song while reading)

He had bars, he had a buzz, he had a name that did exactly what a rap name is supposed to do. It sounded cool. It sounded confident. It sounded like a character you’d want leading a cypher. And then, at some point, the person behind that name looked at it and basically said, nah, this isn’t me, this is a costume.

So he took it off. He stepped out as Simphiwe Manqana, his actual name, the one his mother gave him. No alias. No alter ego to hide behind, no character to blame if things go left. Just him. If you don’t think that’s a wild thing to do, sit with it for a second! In a culture obsessed with branding, with stage names as armor, with personas you can step into and out of like a costume, this man looked at his built in protection and threw it away. He chose to be unmistakably, accountably himself, in an industry built on the exact opposite instinct.

That decision is the whole story. Everything else, the music, the modelling, the camera work, the new project, is just that decision playing out in different mediums. So let’s get into it, because the deeper you go with this guy, the weirder and more interesting it gets.

Quick Disclosure, Then We Move

Simphiwe is my friend. We’ve worked together. I’ve watched him on set, behind the lens, in the booth, on stage and at 2am talking absolute nonsense like normal people do. I’m saying this once, upfront, and then I’m done with it, because here’s the thing about South African music culture. We’re so used to “shoutout my bro” content that the second someone says “this is my friend,” people’s brains file the rest as fluff.

I refuse that. The friendship is real. It’s also irrelevant to whether the work is good, and both things can be true at once. If anything, I’ve held this piece to a higher standard because I know him. I’d rather undersell him and let you discover he’s better than I said, than oversell him and have you feel lied to. Keep that in mind, because here comes the actual mind bender.

Soweto Doesn’t Build You. It Reveals You.

Ask Simphiwe about growing up in Soweto and you won’t get the usual artist bio template, the “we had nothing but we had love” line that’s been recycled into meaninglessness. What you’ll get instead is closer to a philosophy, and it goes something like this.

The township doesn’t make you who you are. It just removes every excuse you had for not finding out.

Sit with that for a second, because it flips basically every “where I’m from” story you’ve ever heard. The conditions don’t create the outcome, not the violence, not the hustle, not the brilliance, not the burnout. They just strip away the comfort, the distractions, the safety nets, until you’re left facing yourself with nowhere to hide. And then you choose. Two people, same block, same lack, same exposure to everything, and one becomes a menace, one becomes a monk, one becomes both depending on the day. The environment didn’t write either story. It just turned the lights on early.

That’s not a comfortable idea. It removes the easy excuses on both sides. You can’t fully blame the place, and you can’t fully credit it either. It puts the weight back on the individual, in a culture that often, understandably given the history, prefers to talk about systems instead of choices. Simphiwe isn’t denying the systems. He’s just refusing to let them be the whole story, and honestly, that refusal might be the most punk thing about him.

God’s Favourite Sinner, June 26th, 2026

Now put that philosophy next to the title of his upcoming project and tell me it doesn’t hit different.

God’s Favourite Sinner.

Sit in that phrase for a second. It’s not “saint.” It’s not “saved.” It’s not the redemption arc, gospel choir outro, “I used to be lost but now I’m found” narrative that so much music defaults to when an artist wants to seem like they’ve grown. It’s the opposite. It’s an artist standing in the mess, in the contradictions, in the choices he’d maybe rather not explain to his grandmother, and saying, this is still me, I’m not asking forgiveness for it, and somehow I still feel chosen.

That’s not arrogance, and it’s not nihilism either. It’s something rarer. It’s radical self honesty dressed up as a flex. “God’s favourite” could read as a joke, a boast, a contradiction or a genuine spiritual claim, and knowing how Simphiwe writes, he’s not going to resolve that ambiguity for you. He’ll let it sit there, uncomfortable, the way real life actually feels, instead of wrapping it up into a neat moral.

Dropping June 26th, 2026. Mark it! I’m not going to drown you in adjectives about how versatile and raw it is, every press release on earth says that. I’ll just say this. If this project does what Simphiwe does in every other medium he’s touched, it’s going to make you feel something specific before it makes you think anything general. That’s the whole game with him.

The Camera Doesn’t Lie, and Neither Does He

Here’s the part that gets slept on. Simphiwe isn’t just a rapper with side hustles. He’s a model and a videographer, and once you understand that the rapping, the modeling and the videography aren’t three different things but one thing seen from three angles, his whole output starts to look different.

When he’s behind the camera, he shoots like someone who’s been in front of one. He knows what it feels like to be looked at, so he doesn’t flatten people, he finds the angle that makes them feel like themselves, amplified. When he’s in front of the camera, modeling, there’s a stillness to him that most performers don’t have, because most performers are working hard to be looked at. He’s just comfortable being seen, and that’s a completely different energy. It’s a huge part of why his stage presence is what it is. He’s not performing confidence for you, he genuinely doesn’t flinch.

And the writing ties it all together. The wordplay, the double meanings, the way a line lands once for the punchline and again for the gut punch underneath it, that’s the same eye that frames a shot or holds a pose. He’s always asking one question across every medium. What does this actually feel like, and how do I make you feel it too without explaining it to death?

That’s charisma. Not loud, not performed, just an absence of fear in the room.

Why I’m Actually Writing This

Zoom out with me for a second.

South African music, especially the alt and underground scenes, is stupidly talented and chronically under resourced. We’ve watched genres born here travel the entire planet while the people who built them were still chasing payment. Our hip hop scene specifically has some of the most technically gifted, distinct voices on the continent, most of them one moment away from either blowing up or vanishing, with very little stable ground in between.

In that world, word of mouth isn’t marketing, it’s infrastructure. “Yo, you need to hear my guy” is sometimes the only distribution system that exists. Which means the responsibility that comes with saying it is higher than it looks, because if everyone says it about everyone, it stops meaning anything, and the artists who actually deserve the boost get lost in the noise of the ones who don’t.

So here’s my actual ask. Don’t take this as “support my friend.” Take it as a challenge. Go listen with your guard up. Try to find the seams. Try to prove me wrong! I’d genuinely rather you walk away unconvinced than walk away because you trusted me on vibes alone, because the day SA artists can only get heard through favours instead of merit is the day we’ve already lost the plot.

I don’t think you’ll walk away unconvinced. But that’s for you to find out, not me to tell you.

One Name, One Shot

He buried Simp Swagg X. No ghost writer credit, no “previously known as” footnote trying to have it both ways. Just Simphiwe, full name, full exposure, full stakes, stepping into a project called God’s Favourite Sinner, about to tell you exactly who the township made him meet, and exactly who he chose to be instead.

June 26th, 2026. Go find out for yourself who that is!

https://music.apple.com/za/artist/simphiwe/547966127

-Neo Phetoe

That’s how it starts, always. Not with a decision. With a forgetting. You forget that you were fine before them. You forget that you had a whole life, a whole self, a whole way of moving through a room that had nothing to do with where they were standing. You just forget. And it feels like magic and you call it that because nobody wants to call it what it actually is.

Surrender.

They stayed up until 3am the first week. Talking about everything. Childhoods. Fears. The specific kind of loneliness that lives in crowded rooms. He said things out loud that he’d only ever thought in the dark and she received them like they were gifts and he thought, finally. Finally someone who gets it.

He didn’t know yet that receiving is not the same as keeping.

But god, those first months. Those stupid, golden, lying first months.

She wore colour then. Bright things. Laughed loud enough that people turned around. He showed up at her door at 11pm just because he wanted to see her face and she opened it like she’d been waiting, like she always opened it like that, like that was just who she was.

It wasn’t who she was. It was who she was performing, for him, for herself, for the story they were both already writing in their heads before anything real had even happened. They were in love with the idea of each other dressed up as each other and nobody said a word because it felt too good to interrogate.

The 3am conversations became 10pm silences. Not comfortable silences. The other kind. The kind that has weight. The kind you can hear.

She stopped wearing the bright colours. He told himself it was a phase. It wasn’t a phase. It was information, the way everything is information if you’re willing to read it, which neither of them were, which is the whole problem with being human and wanting things, you stop reading when the story gets hard.

They fought once about something so small neither of them could remember it three days later. But the feeling stayed. That tight, low grade hum of something wrong. Like a note played slightly off key that you can’t unhear once you’ve heard it.

And instead of following that sound to where it was coming from, they painted over it.

That’s what the middle of a dying thing looks like at this age. Not dramatic. Not screaming. Just two people still texting good morning like it’s a job. Like if they keep the routine alive the feeling will follow. She’d wake up and reach for her phone before she was even fully conscious, not because she was excited, but because not doing it would mean something, and she wasn’t ready for it to mean something yet.He’d reply instantly. He was always awake before her. He’d lie there in the early morning, phone on his chest, waiting, and if she took longer than usual he’d feel it in his stomach, that small anxious drop, and he’d tell himself that was love. That waiting and worrying felt like love when you’re young because nobody has told you yet that it isn’t. That love isn’t supposed to feel like low grade panic wearing a warm hoodie.

They posted pictures. Of course they posted pictures. That was its own kind of glue, the public record of them, the comments, the people saying you two are so cute, the way their names started appearing together in other people’s mouths like a single word. Taking that apart would mean explaining it. Would mean the comments and the questions and the having to say out loud that the thing everyone could see wasn’t what everyone thought it was.

So they kept posting.

She started performing for the camera more than for him. Would think about the picture before she thought about the moment. Would arrange herself, the lighting, the angle, would tag him, would feel the notification of his like and feel something, not love exactly, more like relief. Like proof. Like see, we are still doing this, we are still here, the picture says so.

He started watching her stories before he replied to her texts. She noticed. Didn’t say anything.

They’d sit together in person and both be on their phones and call it quality time because they were in the same physical space and that counted for something even when it counted for less and less. Shoulders touching on a bench, eyes somewhere else entirely. A whole relationship happening in the background of other things.

His friends would ask how she was and he’d say good, she’s good, everything’s good, the word good doing so much work, carrying so much nothing.

Her friends could tell. The way girls can always tell about each other. They’d ask her questions she’d answer too quickly. She’d change the subject with a smile and they’d let her because you can’t make someone ready to say the thing they’re not ready to say.

They still had good days. That’s the complicated part. The thing that makes it so hard to call and so easy to stay. A random Wednesday would hit different, they’d laugh about something stupid for twenty minutes and she’d look at him mid-laugh and think, there he is, that’s why. She’d hold onto that Wednesday for weeks. Would take it out and look at it when things felt grey. Would use it as evidence that she wasn’t wrong for staying, that it wasn’t all performance, that somewhere in there was the real thing they’d started with.

The good days got further apart. She stopped noticing.

He’d play her songs still. That was their language more than words ever were. He’d send a track at 11pm and she’d listen with one earbud in lying on her bed and sometimes it hit and she’d feel close to him across whatever distance had opened up between them and sometimes she’d listen and feel nothing and put her phone face down and stare at the ceiling.

She never told him about the ceiling nights.

They started having the same argument with different words. About attention. About effort. About who was trying and who had stopped and who noticed and who pretended not to. It would start about something specific, a cancelled plan, a dry reply, a night he chose his boys without asking, a night she was distant without explaining, and it would grow into something shapeless, something that was really about all of it, all the small accumulated things, and then one of them would go quiet and the other would follow and nothing would be resolved and they’d wake up the next day and act normal because being normal was easier than being honest.

They got very good at normal.

Could spend an entire weekend together and say nothing real. Could be on the phone for an hour and talk about everything except the thing. They developed a whole vocabulary of avoidance. Jokes that deflected. Topics that were safe. A way of being together that looked full from the outside and felt hollow from the inside, like one of those chocolate eggs that’s just air when you bite through.

She stopped telling him things first. Started processing her days alone or with her girls before she brought anything to him, and even then she’d bring the edited version, the version with the sharp edges filed down, because the sharp edges led to places she didn’t have energy for.

He felt her editing. Felt the distance in it. Didn’t know how to say that without starting the argument again so he said nothing, just moved a little further into himself, just added another floor to the building he was constructing inside, the one with no windows, the one where he went to be alone without going anywhere.

Two people. Same call. Both lying on their separate beds in the dark.

Listening to the silence between words and not saying what it meant.

And here is the part nobody tells you.

The part that comes after the honeymoon, after the first fight, after the first time you look at them mid-sentence and feel nothing, not love, not hate, just a kind of grey, you would think that’s when people leave. You would think the reasonable, self-respecting thing would be to look at the grey and say, this isn’t it, and walk.

But fear is smarter than reason.

Fear says, but what if you leave and it was actually good and you just gave up too soon. Fear says remember the 3am, remember the door at 11pm, remember how it felt to be chosen. Fear says you are not the kind of person who quits. Fear says alone. Fear keeps saying alone until you cannot hear anything else and so you stay

You stay and you renovate. You repaint the walls of something rotting and call it growth. You go out and hold hands and smile with all your teeth and people say you two are so cute and you say thank you and somewhere inside you a light goes off, quietly, like a room nobody uses anymore.

This is the part that breaks me.

That they both knew.

Not all the time, not in the sharp clear way you know things in daylight. But in the body. In the 4am. In the way she’d sometimes look at him mid-sentence and feel something close to grief. They knew. They looked at it sometimes, the truth, the actual shape of what this was, and then they looked away and kept scrolling and asked each other what to eat and picked up the phone again.

Because the bill was already too high.

They had paid with things that don’t grow back quickly. She had paid with her softness, that open-door version of herself that used to laugh at things that weren’t even funny, she’d locked that away so carefully she’d started to forget where she put it. He had paid with his honesty. His peace. The last private room inside himself where he used to feel like a person, not just a half of something that didn’t add up to a whole.

They paid with their integrity. Their happiness. The small everyday things that make a life feel like yours.

And you can’t get that back over a good day. You can’t refund months of making yourself smaller just to fit inside someone else’s fear. You can’t reclaim the versions of yourself you quietly retired, the person who used to text people back, who used to have energy, who used to walk into a room and take up space without calculating the cost of it.

There is no refund.

Not from him. Not from her. Not from anyone who watched it happen and said nothing. Not from the universe, not from the version of yourself that stood at the beginning of all this glowing, full of colour, forgetting your own name, thinking, this is it, this is finally it.

It wasn’t it.

It was two people so terrified of silence that they filled it with each other and called that love. Two people who trauma bonded in the dark and kept the lights off so neither of them would see what they’d actually built. Shallow as an undigged grave. Dressed up, smelling good, saying the right things, completely, utterly, hollow.

And I’m not telling you to leave.

I’m not telling you to stay either.

I’m just saying, look. Look at it with the lights on. Look at what you’ve paid. Look at who you were before the performance started and ask yourself honestly, 4am honestly, where did she go. Where did he go. Where did you go.

Because the cruelest fantasy isn’t the one they sold you.

It’s the one you kept buying.

Every morning. Every stayed. Every I’m fine. Every maybe tomorrow. Every good days got further apart and you stopped noticing.

You were the one renewing the subscription.

And somewhere in the quiet, in the colour you stopped wearing, in the songs you put face down, in the friends you stopped calling back, in the ceiling nights you never mentioned.

You already know.

You’ve known for a while.

-Neo Phetoe

photographed by Neo Phetoe.

The kasi is alive. I need you to understand that before anything else. It is not a backdrop. It is not just where things happened. It breathes. It has moods. It has a memory longer than any one person who ever lived in it. It watched people arrive with dreams and it watched some of those same people leave as shadows of what they came in as, and it just kept going. Kept breathing. The streets still cracked the same way in summer. The corner store still had the same flies around the cool drink fridge. The kasi does not mourn. It just holds everything and keeps moving and if you grew up there you learned to do the same.

I grew up inside something alive. That is the only way I know how to say it.

Saturday mornings were when the kasi exhaled. All week it ran tight, people moving fast, heads down, doing what needed to be done to survive another rotation of this thing. But Saturday morning it let out a breath. You could feel it. Ugogo at the stove before the sun had properly committed to the day, that amagwinya oil hitting the pan like a greeting, like the house itself waking up and saying okay, today we rest a little. The smell would reach you before consciousness did. You would come back to your body slowly, still wrapped in the blanket, and the smell would already be there waiting, patient, telling you without words that you were safe right now. Not always. Not forever. But right now, in this kitchen, with this woman at this stove, you were safe.

Outside the street was tuning itself like an orchestra with no conductor. One yard started with bubblegum, that bright bouncing sound that made your shoulders move without asking permission. Then kwaito from somewhere down the block, heavier, more serious, music that knew things. Gospel from the aunties who had already sorted out their souls by seven am and wanted everyone to know. And makhelwane, always makhelwane, with those speakers that were genuinely too large for that house, bass pushing through the shared wall like it paid rent. You felt that man’s music in your molars. In your sternum. And you never called the police. You never even thought about it. Because that sound was not a disturbance. That sound was the kasi being itself. And you do not call the police on something being itself.

The street absorbed you the moment you stepped into it. You left the yard as a child with a mother and a home and the moment your feet touched the streets something shifted. Not in a scary way, not always, but in the way of entering a different atmosphere. The jungle had its own gravity. Its own temperature. Older kids ran things out there according to rules that nobody wrote down but everybody knew. You learned by watching. You learned by getting it wrong once and making sure you did not get it wrong the same way again. The tar was hot in summer, hot enough to feel through your shoes, and in winter the cold came in from nowhere and bit you while you were busy playing and you just played through it because what else were you going to do. Go inside? Hayi. Inside was for eating and sleeping. Outside was for living.

And I lived out there with everything I had. But I lived out there differently to the other kids and the kasi noticed. The kasi always notices. It is a place with eyes on every corner, not just the people, the place itself seems to watch you, seems to measure you, seems to be deciding something about you while you are just trying to exist. I was the quiet one. The one who would find a broken piece of concrete and sit on it for an hour just watching things. The one with something always in his hands, a stick, a stone, a piece of wire bent into a shape that only made sense to him. Art was not something I chose. It chose me the way the kasi chooses things for you before you know you are being chosen. It just arrived in me one day and made itself at home.

My rents watched it happen and they did not make a big thing of it. That is another thing about it, that outsiders do not understand. Protection there is quiet. It does not announce itself. Your mother does not sit you down and say I see something in you and I am going to guard it. She just appears whenever the thing needs guarding. She just redirects without explaining. She just steers with a hand you barely feel until years later when you realise how many walls she was standing in front of without you knowing. Protect that child. No speech. Just action. Just love doing what love does when it is serious.

But the kasi is indifferent to your mother’s love . It will still put things in your path that she cannot intercept. The bullying came for me because I was not fitting the shape the street expected. I was hood but I was soft with it. I wore what made sense to me. I moved at my own pace. And in a place where standing out can feel like a provocation I was standing out constantly without meaning to.

The pantsulas at the corner clocked me and I want you to understand what that means because it was not random. Pantsulas had a whole language, a whole philosophy, a whole way of carrying themselves that had been built over years and passed down and taken seriously. The crease in the pants. The way they moved. The codes. It was not just a style it was a declaration of where you stood and what you stood for. And then there was me. Wandering past with my sketchbook and my head somewhere else entirely, getting called a skrr skrr like it was an insult, like being the creative quiet kid made me a suspect. And in that world, in that specific tension between pantsula culture and whatever I was becoming, it kind of did make me suspect. I did not speak their language. I was not trying to. And that unbothered quality I had about it made it worse somehow.

There is a particular kind of pain in being made to feel wrong for the exact things that are most true about you. It does not break you loudly. It breaks you quietly, slowly, in small daily doses, until one day you look in the mirror and you are not sure anymore which parts of you are real and which parts you built just to survive the walk to the spaza.

But here is what I knew even then. Those boys were not my enemy. The pantsula at the corner who clocked me sideways had more discipline in how he folded his clothes than most people have in their entire lives. There was artistry in what they did. I just was not the audience for it and they were not the audience for me and the kasi held both of us anyway, same street, same sun, same corner store, same dreams just wearing different clothes.

That is what the kasi can do to you. That is the pressure I am talking about. Not the romantic kind. The actual kind. The weight of a place that has seen so much hardship that it sometimes presses that hardship into you without even meaning to, the way a hand that has carried too much leaves marks on everything it touches after.

But stay with me. Because this is where it turns.

The same pressure. The same weight. The same kasi that watched people disappear into bottle stores that sat on every corner like they were proud of what they were doing. Those places took people. Good people. Funny people. People who had names and plans and a whole light inside them that just slowly went out in those places while everyone else kept moving and pretending not to see because what do you do with something that painful that is also that normal. The grief of the kasi is not dramatic. It is quiet. It is a chair at the table that nobody mentions. It is a name that comes up and then the conversation moves on quickly because moving on is how you survive when there is always something else coming.

But the kasi also gave me my first kite.

I need you to understand what that means. I built that thing from nothing. A plastic bag. Some sticks pulled from somewhere. String that I found. My own two hands and a stubbornness that I did not know yet was one of my greatest gifts. And when I held that string and that thing lifted off the ground and cleared the rooftops and went somewhere I could not follow, something happened in me that I have spent years trying to find the words for. It was the first time I understood that you can make something from nothing. That your hands, your mind, your will, those are resources. Those are enough. The kasi did not give me materials. The kasi gave me the necessity that is the mother of invention. And necessity, real necessity, the kind that lives in your body, that is a teacher that nothing else can replicate.

My marble collection. Small glass worlds in my pocket that I knew by name, by colour, by the way each one caught the light differently. I was serious about those marbles the way the kasi taught you to be serious about anything you had, because you did not always know when the next thing was coming and so you honoured what was in your hands right now. That is not poverty thinking. That is presence. That is a relationship with the moment that most people spend their whole comfortable lives trying to learn in yoga studios and mindfulness retreats. I learned it at eight years old on a hot tar road with glass marbles and everything to lose.

The scars. My knees still remember every fall. Every piece of broken bottle, every rough patch of road, every game that got too physical because that is just how we played. We played like we meant it. We played like the street was watching and it was. And those scars are mine. Every single one of them is a record of being alive and being in it. Not watching. Not safe on the sidelines. In it.

The kasi made me a diamond. Not the jewelry store kind. The real kind. The kind that started as something ordinary and got put under so much pressure for so long that it had no choice but to become something else. Harder. Clearer. Able to cut through things that should not be able to be cut through. That is what the ghetto does to the ones it does not consume. It compresses you into something that the comfortable world has no category for. Something that does not make sense on paper but makes complete sense the moment you see it working.

I am that. I am from that.

So when the Soweto sits in my words and the kasi breathes through my sentences and the lingo lands somewhere you were not expecting, just know. That is not an accident. That is not a performance. That is the place itself, still alive in me, still breathing through everything I make.

The ghetto is not just where I am from.

It is what I am made of.

And I would not trade a single scar.

-Neo Phetoe

I have grown a lot. More than I can even properly explain to anyone, including myself. The version of me from five years ago would look at who I am now and not recognise everything. The things I used to accept, I no longer accept. The things I used to chase, I have quietly let go. The way I used to need to be understood by everyone around me, I have mostly stopped doing that too. Growth does not always come with a big announcement. A lot of it happens in the silence, in the small moments where you choose differently without even realising you have changed.

And the strange thing about growing is that it does not mean the people around you stopped too. They were changing as well, in their own direction, at their own pace, in ways I was not always paying attention to.

We all assume we know the people closest to us. But I think what we actually know is the version of them that we first understood, and we hold onto that version like it is permanent. Like people are photographs. But people are not photographs. They are moving, shifting, becoming. And sometimes you look up and realise the person in front of you is not quite who you thought they were, and they are looking at you thinking the exact same thing.

I used to find that unsettling. The idea that the people I love most might not be seeing the real me. That no matter how long someone has known me, they are really only seeing the parts I consciously or unconsciously let through. Not out of hiding, just because that is how it works. You cannot pour everything inside you into every interaction. So you give people pieces. And they build a version of you from those pieces, and they call that version your name.

To some people I am probably simple. To others maybe I am difficult to read. To some I am too much, and to others I am not enough, the most creative, loud, quiet and probably shy person they have ever met and still somehow not what they expected. And for a long time I tried to adjust myself depending on which room I was in, trying to be the version of me that made the most sense to the people around me. Trying to be understood felt like a full time job that I was always failing at.

But here is what I have slowly come to understand. The only person who has ever had full access to me is me. Every late night thought, every fear I never said out loud, every version of myself I was too afraid to show, every moment I felt something deeply and kept it entirely to myself, that all lives in me and only in me.

And there is something both lonely and freeing about that. Lonely because being truly known in the full sense of the word is basically impossible, and once you accept that you feel it. But freeing because it means I am not responsible for managing everyone’s perception of me. People will see what they see. Some of it will be accurate. A lot of it will be a reflection of themselves more than it is a reflection of me. What I choose to mirror outward, whether I do it consciously or not, says something about where I am internally. And that is something I have started paying more attention to.

I think what growing up actually means, at least for me, is becoming comfortable being the only one who has read the full story of my own life. Other people are working from chapters. Some have a few pages. Some have a paragraph. And none of them are wrong exactly, they just do not have the whole thing. And I spent a lot of years being frustrated by that, wishing people could just see more. But you cannot force that. You cannot hand someone your entire world in a conversation and expect them to hold it the way you do.

And yet, the people closest to me, my family, my friends, they still show up. Not because they know every part of me, but because they know enough. They understand me to a certain extent and sometimes that is actually a win. There is something beautiful about being loved not in full but in part, and having that part still feel like home. Not everyone needs the whole picture to show up for you consistently, and that matters more than I used to give it credit for.

But here is what I have also come to realise. The parts of me that people do not fully know, that is not a weakness. That is a superpower. There is power in not being completely figured out. It means you are still becoming. It means no one can put a ceiling on you because they have not seen your floor. The mystery of a person who is still growing into themselves is one of the most powerful things in the world, and most of us spend our lives trying to explain it away instead of standing in it.

What you show the world is a translation. It is real, it is honest, but something always gets lost between what you feel and what actually comes out. The original stays inside. And I have made a kind of peace with that. Not because I stopped wanting to be known, but because I stopped making that the condition for feeling okay about who I am.

I know myself in a way no one else ever will. I have seen myself at my lowest, at my most confused, at my most honest, at the moments I am most proud of and the ones I am most ashamed of. I have watched myself change and stayed through all of it. That is not nothing.

The people around me will keep growing too, into versions of themselves I have not met yet. Some of them will grow towards me and some will grow away, and that is the nature of it. The best I can do is keep growing honestly, keep showing up as the most real version of myself I can manage on any given day, and trust that the right people will recognise something true in that even if they cannot name exactly what it is.

Like Nasty C said, you don’t know a soul except the one your own. I understand that now more than I ever did before. And I think the whole point is not to mourn it. The point is to take that seriously, to treat your own soul as the one relationship you cannot afford to be a stranger in.

Because at the end of every day, after all the noise and all the versions of yourself you showed to different people in different rooms, you still have to come home to yourself. And I think that is worth something. Actually, I think that is everything.

-Neo Phetoe

Love existed before language did. Before anyone named it. Before someone decided it had to be announced to be real. It was already in the soil, already hanging in the air, already doing its thing long before you or I arrived to claim it.I believe that. I really do. And that is exactly why what happened at the kraal felt so ancient. So true. Like something my blood knew before my brain could catch up.

The Place

I met you at the kraal. Kwa’makhosi. Not on a timeline. Not in someone’s comment section. Not sliding into anything. The kraal. Cows eating grass. Dust settling on everything. The kind of quiet that cities have long forgotten how to make. And I thanked God for that. Ngempela. Ke a leboga, truly.

Because if I had met you online you would have been a highlight reel and I would have been a follow request and we would have performed something instead of felt it. We would have started things backwards, the way our generation always does. Attraction first. Then the curated version of ourselves. Then somewhere much later, maybe, the truth.

But there were no filters at the kraal. No one filming anything for content. Just you, and me, and the particular way the light was doing something that afternoon that I still cannot describe properly.

You were so brown. I was so brown. I thought, our melanin could contour each other. The kind that does not need a filter because it already glows from somewhere deep. From soil, and sun, and generations of people who loved hard under difficult skies.

The Moment

We held hands. I do not even remember how it happened. It just did, the way things do when no one is performing anything. We made eye contact and stayed there. Long enough to read something in each other that neither of us said out loud.

O bua le moya waka.

You did not have to explain yourself. You did not have to be impressive. You were just there. And so was I. And it was enough.

There is a specific kind of peace that comes with being fully seen by a stranger. Not judged. Not assessed. Not compared to anyone. Just seen. I did not know I was hungry for that until you gave it to me without even trying.

At the kraal there are no rules. No one pulling you aside to ask, so what are you two, are you talking, is it official, what’s the situationship status. None of that. Just the moment and what you choose to do with it.

We lived in the moment so completely that we forgot the moment would end.

I never asked your name. Not because I forgot. Because in that moment your name felt like tomorrow’s business and I was too deep in right now to go looking for tomorrow. I was too caught in the warmth of your hand. The silence that was not awkward. The way the cows did not care and the grass did not care and the whole place felt like it existed outside of every rule I had ever been taught.

The Walk Home

Ga ke itse leina la gago.

I do not know your surname. I do not know where you sleep or what you eat in the morning. I cannot search you. There is no algorithm that knows your face the way I briefly did that afternoon.

So I gave you a name. Emlangeni. My love, the one at the river. Because I had to call you something and that name felt like it was already yours.

Ngizobuya ngithole ntoni.

I kept asking myself that on the walk home. Would I ever come back and find you standing in that same dust, looking up at that same sky? Probably not. Life does not really work like that. The kraal is not a place where people wait.

But I held the question anyway. The way you hold something you already know the answer to but are not ready to put down yet.

What Actually Happened

“Vuka. Vuka, uzolala yonke le mini.”

My mother’s voice. Her hand on my shoulder. Not gentle. The way mothers wake you when they have already called you twice. Morning light through curtains that were not the kraal sky. The smell of the house, not dust and grass and cattle. Just home. And just like that, you were gone. You were never there.

Ke ne ke lora.

I dreamt. That is all it was. The cows, the dust, the silence, the brown warmth of your hand in mine. All of it built by my sleeping brain and offered to me like a gift. Then taken back before I could say thank you, or wait, or at least tell me your name.

But Here Is The Thing

Even in a dream, a place my own mind built from scratch with no rules, no one watching, I still did not ask. I still chose the moment over the details. I still let myself get so lost in what was happening that I forgot to hold onto it.

Maybe that is not a flaw in me. Maybe that is just what love does when it finds you somewhere real, even if that somewhere only existed while I was asleep.

Maybe the dream was trying to show me something. That I am ready. That somewhere inside me there is a version of love that does not need to be curated or cautious. A love that can hold a stranger’s hand at a kraal and feel completely at home. A love that is brown, and quiet, and does not need an audience.

I just needed to feel that.

And some encounters are not meant to be continued. They are meant to be felt, fully, once, and then carried forward like something cupped in your hands on a windy day. Careful not to spill it. Careful not to name it too quickly. Just holding it, still warm, all the way into the waking world.

Emlangeni, hope you were also dreaming.

Neo Phetoe

I said it and I meant it and I will keep saying it until someone hears me. Not because the struggle was worthless, not because the blood was wasted, but because you, black child, wena, ngane yami, you are still living like it was. Like the chains just changed material. Like oppression got a rebrand and you called it progress.

I died for nothing because you still wake up and the first thing you do is apologise for existing in your own skin. You filter your face before you post it. You straighten your hair before the interview. You rehearse a softer accent before you walk into a room full of people who have never once questioned whether they belong there. Eish. I did not die for that.

I saw myself in the mirror and I loved what looked back. Not because I was naive, not because I did not know what the world thought of me, but because I chose to see myself before the world got the chance to. That was the whole point. That was everything. And somewhere between 1977 and now you lost it.

South Africa is free on paper. The flag changed, the president changed, the language of the oppression changed, but kyk om jou, kind, really look. Your leaders are eating and you are watching them eat and calling it representation. You are proud of a man in a suit who used to quote Sobukwe and now quotes hedge fund returns. You cheer for proximity to power and call it liberation. Uyadla wethu, nibukele. You are having breadcrumbs and you decorated the plate yourself.

The system did something clever to you. It made the cage comfortable enough that you stopped rattling it. It gave some of you jobs inside the machine and told the rest of you to aspire to that. It made you police each other. It made you embarrassed of the ones who still speak loudly, still dress differently, still say the things out loud that you only think in private. Uthini ke? You say the ones who left sold out. I think selling out looks different now. I think selling out is staying and performing gratitude for a freedom that is still conditional.

Your art though. Your art is still the most alive thing on this continent. The music, the fashion, the storytelling, the way you find beauty in places that were never designed for you. Awusho, that thing you do, that defiance, that insistence on being fully human even when everything around you is telling you to shrink, that is yours. That came from the same place I came from. But even that gets taken. Someone packages it, someone profits from it, someone puts it on a global stage and your name is in the small print if it is there at all. And you thank them for the exposure. Haibo.

I think about my old friends sometimes. The ones who sat in rooms with me and talked about a South Africa that belonged to its people. Bazephi labo? What happened to that conversation. What happened to the children they raised. The ones now sitting in those same rooms, different chairs, still making the same people rich, still leaving the same people behind. I do not say this with hatred. I say it with grief. We bled together. We believed together. And somewhere the belief got replaced with survival and survival got replaced with comfort and comfort is a very slow way to disappear.

Black child, ntwana, you are not free just because no one is legally stopping you. You are not free when you are ashamed of your nose, your groove, your grandmother’s tongue, ulwimi lwakho, oluya olwakhokho bakho. You are not free when you need their validation to feel that your art is real, your culture is valid, your life has value.

I was not just a shade of brown. I was not just a symbol you put on a t-shirt in February. I was a person who decided that loving himself was a political act, ukuzithanda kwakho kusenzo sepolotiki, and I paid for it with everything.

So I need you to ask yourself. Genuinely ask yourself. Not for me, not for the history books, just for the person you are when no one is watching.

If I died so you could be free, kutheni, why do you still live like you need permission?

Neo Phetoe

Cheri no Lova

There is love that feels like standing at the edge of the ocean watching waves pull back and crash forward, never quite knowing if you will be swept away or left waiting on the shore. Cheri believed in love the way some people believe in gravity. It was inevitable, essential and worth falling for. She did not just want love. She wanted the kind that stretched her, challenged her and pushed her into spaces where her name echoed back and transformed. She wanted to evolve ,to become something more than what she was yesterday and to reach heights where the air was thinner and the view was clearer.

Bakopana

He was not cruel. He was not distant by design. He loved her in the only way he knew how. He was cautious and kept a safe distance with one foot always ready to step back. He was avoidant though ,labels rarely capture the complexity of a heart that wants but will not reach. He could see her, truly see her but only in glimpses. She moved too fast and grew too quickly. She evolved in real time while he stood still measuring the distance between where he was and where he thought he might want to be.

Kwa tshimologong

At first it felt like enough. His love however small and guarded still felt like sunshine through a crack in the curtains. Cheri took what he gave and watered it like a garden hoping it would bloom into something bigger. She told herself that love was patient and that growth took time. She believed that if she just held on long enough he would see what she saw, a future glowing with possibility.

She began to stretch. She read books that made her question everything she thought she knew. She traveled to places where no one knew her name ,where she could try on new versions of herself like clothes in a fitting room. She spoke up in rooms where her voice once trembled. She became louder, softer ,sharper and gentler all at once. She evolved.

U Lova wabuka

He loved her yes. He saw the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about her dreams. He noticed the confidence that began to straighten her spine and the way she moved through the world like she was finally learning the choreography. But he did not move with her. He stood where he had always been scanning the horizon wondering if somewhere out there the grass might be greener, the risk smaller and the love easier.

ku rindza

Ulova. That is what she started calling him in her mind. The one who loves but does not leap. He was not scared he insisted. He was just waiting for the right moment. He was waiting for clarity. He was waiting for certainty. He was waiting for the universe to hand him a guarantee that did not exist.

But time ruthless and indifferent does not wait. It does not pause for people who need more time to decide or more proof that love is worth the gamble. Time moved forward and so did Cheri.

She grew tired of shrinking herself to fit into his field of vision. She stopped slowing down so he could catch up. She realized that love was not supposed to feel like holding your breath underwater wondering if you would surface before your lungs gave out. Love was supposed to feel like air itself. It was meant to be constant necessary and freeing.

Still she loved him. She loved him deeply. Even as she evolved beyond the version of herself that believed waiting was the same as commitment she held on. She did not hold on because she was weak but because she was human. She knew that letting go of someone you love feels like cutting off a piece of yourself even when you know it is necessary for survival.

Indaleko

Then one day something shifted. It was not dramatic. There was no fight no betrayal and no moment of sudden clarity. It was quieter than that. It was the slow creeping realization that she had already left. She was not physically gone but she was gone in spirit ,emotion and mind. She had evolved so far beyond the space they once shared that returning felt impossible.

She looked at him and saw someone she loved deeply but could no longer wait for. She saw a man frozen in indecision standing at the edge of his own life convinced that the right moment would eventually arrive if he just stayed still long enough. She felt something she never expected: compassion mixed with distance and love mixed with release.

She had become what he thought about. She had become the dream he was too afraid to chase.

And he had become the memory of a love that taught her what she deserved.

Cheri ka lova is a story about two people who loved each other in different tenses. She loved him in the present actively with her whole body leaning forward into the future. He loved her in the conditional in the maybe and in the someday. While both are forms of love only one of them builds a life.

She did not leave because she stopped loving him. She left because she started loving herself more. She left because evolution does not wait for permission and growth does not pause for people who are not ready. She left because staying would have meant becoming smaller quieter and less and she had worked too hard to become more.

Ulova waited. He waited for the right moment that never came for the certainty that does not exist and for the version of her that no longer existed either. He stood at the same crossroads still wondering if the grass was greener somewhere else not realizing that green grass grows where you water it.

Cheri evolved. She became everything she hoped for and more. She learned that love is not about holding on until your hands bleed it is about knowing when to open them and let go. She learned that you can love someone and still choose yourself. She learned that sometimes the most profound act of love is walking away. And somewhere in the spaces no one else could reach she bloomed.

Neo phetoe

photographer : Neo Phetoe