notice how fast the world moves without asking for your permission. notice the endless stream of things demanding your time, your energy, your answers, and your peace.

we build whole lives out of carrying things we were never meant to hold all at once: the quiet anxieties about next week, the unspoken worries sitting heavily in the back of your mind and the constant, exhausting urge to fix what is broken before the day ends.

we carry it so quietly that we don't even realize we're doing it.

the shoulders creep up toward your ears, building a tiny fortress of tension.

your jaw tightens against everything you haven't said.

your breath turns small, shallow and fast just enough to keep moving, but never enough to rest.

you’ve been holding your breath, waiting for the storm to clear before you allow yourself to breathe. but you don't have to wait.

stop. right here.

drop your shoulders.

unclench your jaw.

close your eyes

and just breath.

the world outside can keep roaring.

the clocks will keep ticking regardless of how fast you run. but in this exact space, within the simple rhythm of your own chest, nothing is asking you to prove yourself.

you don't need to solve the puzzle of your life today. you don't need to have all the answers mapped out for tomorrow. you are allowed to just exist in this single second.

inhale: pull in the quiet air. let it fill the spaces that have felt tight and crowded. let the entire world pause for just one heartbeat.

exhale: let go of the hurry, the noise and the static. blow away the constant pressure to hold everything together on your own.

you are carrying so much, but you are doing the best you can. you don't have to carry the whole world to be worthy of rest.

you're doing enough, you are enough and i hope you believe that.

you don't have to finish the journey right now. you just have to take the very next breath.

it’s okay. it’s okay. you are going to be okay.

love yours, palesa.💌

i probably sound like a broken record, constantly talking about love and the ridiculously specific way i want it to feel. but since abuti gave me this topic, i guess we’re doing this again. welcome back to another episode of me being a hopeless romantic :)

if i ever find myself falling in love, i hope it happens slowly—an intentional unfolding rather than a sudden collision. i've spent enough time romanticizing chaos, mistaking uncertainty for passion and inconsistency for excitement. these days, i crave something quieter. something that doesn't have to prove itself by being loud.

i want a love that feels like certainty.

not the kind that arrives with extravagant confessions and promises only to disappear when life becomes ordinary, but the kind that remains. the kind that chooses each other, over and over again, even when there are no special occasions to celebrate.

i want the romance hidden inside the mundane.

learning exactly how they take their coffee. memorizing the little changes in their voice when they're tired. knowing when they need conversation and when they simply need someone to sit beside them in comfortable silence. falling in love with the smallest details until they become my favorite parts of the day.

i want us to become each other's safest place.

a place where vulnerability is never mistaken for weakness. where honesty is welcomed instead of feared. where silence doesn't need filling, and neither of us has to shrink ourselves just to be understood. i want us to carry each other's burdens without making them feel heavier.

i want to look at you and feel like i'm looking at a garden filled with bloomed tulips on a sunny sunday morning.

i don't want someone who loves the idea of me. i want someone willing to know me completely. the complicated parts, the quiet parts, the healing parts and choose to stay anyway. and i want to know them the same way too. someone who isn't intimidated by my depth, but curious enough to explore it with me.

and if i'm fortunate enough to find that kind of love, i won't take it for granted.

i'll make promises that are meant to be lived, not just spoken.

i'll choose them on the ordinary days, not only the beautiful ones.

i'll notice the things they don't know how to put into words.

i'll protect their peace as fiercely as i've learned to protect my own.

i'll celebrate who they are without trying to reshape them into someone else.

i'll remind them, in ways both big and small, that they are deeply loved, not just when it's convenient but every chance i get.

because love to me, isn't measured by how intensely it begins.

it's measured by how gently it stays.

so if i ever find myself falling in love, i don't want it to feel like a whirlwind.

i want it to feel like coming home to someone who has been waiting with the light on, coffee on one hand and the other waiting to feel the touch of my skin.

may the love i find one day be less like a spark that burns brightly for a moment, and more like a fire that never forgets to keep us warm.

i just can’t wait to realign stars when we collide.

-to the lover i am yet to find, Makhubheka, 2026

i saw this trend happening on my feed recently—a challenge where you choose from five specific photos to formulate a piece. actually created the challenge and seeing the creative pull of it, i decided i had to hop on ( angfuni ukundlulwa).

there is a distinct kind of exhaustion that comes from protecting an angle.

look at the mirror in the image. it presents a flawless, red apple. it is smooth, upright and perfectly intact. if you only looked at the glass, you would assume everything was fine. you’d see something whole, functional and exactly as it should be.

but step back and the frame widens.

the reality sitting on the table is entirely different. the front of the fruit—the part facing away from the glass, hidden from the world is completely eroded. it looks torn open, hollowed out and deformed.

it is an image of profound internal collapse, existing simultaneously with a picture perfect presentation.

this isn't just a clever trick of photography and lighting; it’s a striking expression of the facades we build to survive.

a perfect reflection of a hollow thing.

for the past few years, i’ve realized i am the apple in the mirror.

to my friends, my family and the people around me, i have mastered the art of the perfect reflection. when someone asks how i am, the automated, effortless response is always,

“i'm fine."

when i was definitely not fine. i smile through the sharpest stabs of internal pain and i’ve quietly navigated the heavy, disorienting weight of heartbreak entirely in the dark.

when you become the person who holds everyone else together, the world starts to treat your strength as a given. i have held my friends while they fell apart, sat with them in their heaviest hours, and offered a steady shoulder to lean on—and i have loved every moment of comforting them and sitting with them in their struggles. but there is a quiet, devastating loneliness that settles in when the roles are reversed. you realize you’ve built the facade so well that when you actually need to be held, you don't know how to open the door—and even if you did, you wonder if anyone would know how to hold the pieces.

we live in a culture obsessed with the mirror. we project the intact reflection because the world knows exactly what to do with a perfect apple.

it admires it.

it relies on it.

the danger of course, is that the energy required to maintain that reflection pulls from the very resources we need to heal our own reality. it takes a strange, quiet toll on the psyche to know that if anyone walked around to the other side of your table, they would see how much has been scooped out of you.

true wholeness doesn't mean never breaking; it means letting the mirror finally reflect the truth. there is an immense, terrifying but necessary freedom in letting the image crack, if only to finally let the people who care about us see the reality of who we are, and give them the chance to finally hold us back.

lately, i’ve caught myself looking at strangers with a suspicious amount of optimism, mostly because i’ve realized how incredibly grateful i am that you exist somewhere out there in the world.

statistically speaking, we’ve probably already shared the same recycled air in a crowded room or stood a few people apart in an impossibly slow queue, both silently questioning why we ever left the house.

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sometimes i wonder if you were the person who took the last chocolate super m at checkers last week— the one i’d already claimed as mine. if it was you, i’ve decided to forgive you. but i do expect atleast 5 more in return, ngyadlala (angdlali).

it’s funny how close we might already be to the beginning of our story without either of us knowing it. right now you're living your life, completely unaware that somewhere, someone is already writing to you.

when we finally meet, though, i’d like us to ignore everything the movies taught us. i don't need a dramatic downpour or some grand, cinematic moment. wet clothes are uncomfortable and i'd rather our story begin somewhere ordinary.

maybe i'll drop something because I'm distracted, and you'll help me pick it up. maybe i'll make an awkward joke to fill the silence. hopefully, you'll laugh—not because it's particularly funny, but because you like the person telling it.

that's all i really want.

just an ordinary tuesday that somehow turns into hours of conversation, until the café staff start stacking chairs around us as a not so subtle reminder that they've closed.

and once we get past that first chapter, i already know what your love will feel like.

not like fireworks. not like chaos.

but warmth, the kind you feel at 9am in the morning when the sun is out.

the kind that makes the rest of the world quiet. the kind that feels like finally exhaling after holding your breath for far too long.

i also know i'm going to be terrible at listening to you sometimes. not because i don't care, but because i'll be far too busy admiring the way your face changes when you talk about something you love. you'll be explaining some obscure fact, a hobby you've somehow become an expert in, or a random theory that fascinates you.

i’ll hear your voice, but not the words. i'll just be thinking about how beautiful it is to watch someone light up from the inside.

then you'll ask, " baby were you listening?”

and i'll have to admit that i wasn't.

not because you were boring.

because you were beautiful.

i wonder what the little things about you will become my favorite. the way you'll absent mindedly reach for my hand in a crowd. the look you'll give me from across a room when something reminds you of an inside joke.

the way you'll say my name when no one else is around. i think love is built from moments so ordinary that no one else notices them—but somehow they become the memories we return to for the rest of our lives.

rato laka i hope you don't mind sharing the aux cord with someone whose playlists have absolutely no sense of direction. one minute it'll be a song that feels like reading poetry at midnight, and next it'll be a king monada song just to balance the pediness in me.

you should also know that if i ever confidently say, "i know a shortcut," you should politely ignore me and trust the gps instead. i promise it will save us both a great deal of unnecessary adventure.

still, maybe getting a little lost won't be so bad lmao. it will give us more time to argue over whose turn it is to pick the next song, more time for me to pretend i’m listening while secretly admiring you again and more memories we'll accidentally create because neither of us knew exactly where we were going.

maybe that's what love is.

not finding someone who always knows the way.

just finding someone who doesn't mind getting a little lost with you.

until then, i'll keep wondering if we've already passed each other without realizing it.

and if you really were the one who took that super m??

you're forgiven.

for now.

i was listening to No Way by Toni Braxton and i can't help but sit here and imagine how my life would be if you were already in it.

to the person i haven't met yet,

right now, you are just an idea i keep warm in my head, but i already know the weight of you. you feel like a soft, quiet morning. like the way rain softly lands on the ground right before a storm hits, that beautiful, breathless pause where everything is still and safe, just before the sky breaks open.

i think about what it will look like when we are finally in the thick of it. not in the beginning, not in the guessing, but in the certainty of it. when we are so madly, completely ruined for anyone else that it’s evident to everyone in the room without us saying a word. i want that gut-wrenching kind of devotion. the kind where our eyes catch across a crowded space and everything else just turns to static. i want us to have a laughter that sounds entirely different from the way we laugh with the rest of the world a private, breathless sound that only belongs to us, like a language no one else gets to translate.

(e le nna le wena after date night)

i find myself mapping out the tiny, ordinary pieces of a life we haven't built yet.

i can't wait to call you rato laka in a crowd and watch you turn to meet my eyes, i can't wait for the quite days spent on the coach sharing a pair of earphones sitting so close together that our heartbeats sync, shoulder to shoulder lost in our own books but anchored by the same melody running through the wire. i can't wait for mornings and evenings we'll spend in the kitchen learning new recipes or making our favorite dishes, to wandering down grocery store aisles on a mundane tuesday, the effortless warmth of it and how i'll sneak in an extra snack or two into the trolley when you aren't looking just to hear that specific fond sigh of yours followed by a smirk.

i want to go to pottery classes with you. try a dance class together, dress up and try a new jazz bar in town, travel the world together then come back to our room to have the steamiest sex ever. oh gosh i want it all with you.

ey sengiya blush'a man down man down.

i think about the kind of silence that won’t feel empty. the kind where nothing needs to be said because everything already is understood. where being next to you feels like exhaling after holding my breath for too long, like my body finally remembering how to rest.

and i think about the quietest, heaviest moments too. the ones where the world shrinks into a dark room, and i just lie there in the stillness, watching you sleep. the steady rise and fall of your chest. the softness of your face when you don’t know you’re being looked at. and that overwhelming, terrifyingly beautiful thought of

“oh, thank god, there you are.”

i wonder if love like that will feel calm. or if it will always feel like something breaking open inside me every time i look at you.

because i don’t just want the easy parts of love. i want the kind that feels like coming home after years of being lost, even if i didn’t know i was searching. i want the kind that makes me softer without making me smaller. the kind that lets me be fully seen and still somehow loved more because of it.

and maybe the scariest part is that i already live with you in pieces. in imagined routines. in rehearsed conversations. in the way my mind has started to build a life around someone who hasn’t arrived yet.

i am already making space for you in places you haven’t touched yet. already building habits around your absence. already imagining the shape of your voice in conversations we haven’t had. already holding you gently in a future that hasn’t arrived.

it’s a mix of everything. the giddy, electric curiosity of not knowing who you are yet and the deeper, grounding ache of loving the idea of you so fully that it almost feels like memory instead of imagination.

and still, i know love won’t arrive perfectly. it never does. it will come messy, unexpected, unpolished at the edges. it will interrupt me. it will challenge me. it will not always feel like poetry.

but i hope that even in its imperfection, it still feels like this, like softness that survives everything. like choosing each other again and again even when it’s not easy. like finding something rare and deciding not to let it slip through our hands.

until then, i am keeping the space ready for you rato laka not empty, but waiting. not incomplete, but open.

i am holding onto all of it.

sometimes i feel like Jesus on the cross in his last moments, when he cried out to God, “why have you forsaken me?" well, that’s exactly how i feel, almost every day. i still sit here, looking at my life asking that same exact question. Why have you forsaken me?

the weight of the anchor

for a long time in my house, i was the one with the most faith—well, after my dad who we always called the household’s prayer warrior. we used to be a massive, devoted christian family, the kind that never missed a single Sunday service. but when 2020 hit, the ground beneath us completely cracked. my dad lost his job, and suddenly, we had absolutely nothing. i had to watch my mother sit in the car every single day, crying her eyes out from the sheer weight of trying to keep us afloat. living through that changed something in us; our faith fractured, and the fierce hope we once held just died down.

​before August 2024, i had reached a point where i genuinely believed dying would be a relief—a way to escape the sheer weight of everything. but then, right on the edge of losing my life, I landed in a hospital bed. it was there, as i felt myself taking what felt like my very last breath, that a sudden terror overrode everything else. i didn't want to go. i managed to squeeze out a desperate, silent prayer in my heart: “Lord, please, I will not go out like this”.

​against all the odds, He saved me. i think that hospital room was the exact moment i saw God again, right when i last expected to find Him. but the relief didn't last. almost as soon as He answered that prayer, He left me again—abandoning me right back out in the cold.

“it's alright i deserve the silence” i said to myself after praying & reading my Bible for a month.

so i did what i always knew how to do: i prayed. i begged. i forced the words out.

but a cruel pattern started happening. every single time i prayed, everything just got worse. worse, worse, and worse. it got to a point where a bizarre, exhausting thought crossed my mind: maybe if I just don't do anything, something good will finally happen.

because praying felt like a trigger for more hardship. on the rare occasions it felt like God actually answered, it was only ever for a little while. a brief moment of relief, and then the door would slam shut again.

then came a massive, painful breakup. more begging. more forcing things. still, nothing changed.

eventually, the exhaustion catches up to you. i got so tired of talking to a wall. i stopped praying every day because it simply stopped making sense to me. why would i continue crying out if nothing is changing?

even though i’ve given up on praying in general, i find that the muscle memory is still there. i still listen to gospel music a lot more than i’d like to admit (a self-diagnosed gospel-aholic lmaoo). sometimes i listen to it unintentionally, not even because i want to, but just because i’ve been doing the exact same routine since the day i first found faith. my mind has given up, but my habits haven't.

​and the strangest thing is, i still whisper a little prayer when i see an ambulance speeding by, or when i see an accident on the road, or a simple “thank you God for this day” i do it because deep down, i still believe god answers prayers. i just believe he answers their prayers. i figure he’ll hear me for them, coz ngbonile ukuthi mina akangi naki, he’s already made it clear that he isn't paying attention to me. even though angshaya nge blue tick, i still find myself begging for some change, but keh, as always, uyang blue tick-a anake abanye.

the hardest pill to swallow is looking around. i see the people around me getting all the things they prayed for, all the things they asked for. they get the breakthroughs. i don't. from where i am sitting, looking at my family and my life, it just seems unfair. It feels cruel.

i don’t want this to sound like I’m disrespecting God. i'm not trying to shout at the heavens or be rebellious. It’s just that I am so profoundly disappointed. and more than anything, i am just so, so tired.

thank you for reading, until next time :)

i sing to myself all night trying to fight off these thoughts, as i sing along to the song in my headphones. they are the kinds of thoughts that haunt me even on the days i feel completely okay and content—quietly whispering, “you’ll never be enough,” while i stare blankly at my ceiling, imagining a life better than this one.

in the middle of the quiet night, j. cole’s “love yourz” starts playing in my head, and i release a bitter little giggle. yeah, that man lied. surely this is not the life that is supposedly better, right? but immediately, the guilt creeps in. “how dare i be ungrateful when there are people out there who have it so much tougher than me?” the good voice in my head says. it’s an exhausting cycle drowning in your own mind while simultaneously scolding yourself for making a splash because you think your pain isn't valid enough.

as i lie here, my thoughts drift back to a text message from a year ago. it was late at night, the exact kind of midnight where everything feels too heavy to carry alone, and i was venting to my male best friend about how brutal my week had been.

he knows me. he knows how much i go through, and he was coming from a place of pure concern and worry when he typed out a question that completely shattered the room:

“do you enjoy feeling depressed?”

i remember typing and deleting, sighing into the glow of my phone screen, not knowing how to answer him. how do you explain to the person who cares about you that you don't enjoy it, but after a certain point, the dark stops feeling like a scary monster and starts feeling like a familiar room?

that’s what the title of this piece means: ndolulela isandla kumnyama empilweni yami. sometimes, when you’ve been in the dark for so long, you stop fighting for the light switch. you just reach your hand out to the darkness, hold onto it, and let it accompany you because it’s the only thing that hasn't left.

a part of me wanted to text him back the absolute truth: “i’ve never been happy my whole life, so what’s the use of pretending now?” but another part of me wanted him to know that i really am trying. i try my absolute best every single day to pull myself out of this hellhole—a hellhole i still stubbornly refuse to call "depression"—but sometimes, my hands just slip.

his final text that night was a heavy dose of reality wrapped in love: “it’s been 5 years man, seek help.”

a year has passed since that text conversation, and the math still sits heavy in my chest. five years. half a decade of a quiet, unnamed war inside my own head.

i haven’t figured it all out yet. i’m still staring at the ceiling, still fighting the thoughts and still listening to that voice tell me to be grateful. but i am still here. i am still singing to myself in the dark, still trying to crawl out of the hellhole and still learning how to take that hand i reached out to the darkness, and use it to pull myself up instead.

the post was simple, but the comment section was a masterpiece– a collective, sprawling poem written by thousands of strangers. people were spilling their guts about the things they reach for but can’t touch, and reading it was the most real, beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time. My first thought was, "yah, story of my life." but as i sat there, i realized that "yearning" is a tricky thing to own up to. it’s almost embarrassing. it’s the emotional equivalent of seeing someone wave in your direction and involuntarily raising your hand to wave back only to realize, with a hot flash of shame, that they were actually greeting the person standing right behind you ( also this happens to me more often than i'd like to admit lmao)

yearning is that constant, misplaced reach. we often talk about it as if it’s a temporary state— a bridge between losing something and finding it again. but for me, it isn't a bridge; it’s the landscape. it is a quiet, background hum that has followed me from childhood into my adult life, a persistent "not-quite-here" feeling that colors everything I touch.

The Sweetness of the Ache

despite the embarrassment of the "misplaced wave," there is a strange beauty in it. to yearn is to be acutely alive. It’s the reason certain songs feel like they were written specifically for your ribs. It’s the way a specific shade of twilight can make you feel like you’re on the verge of a great discovery.

when I am at my most creative, it is the yearning that drives the pen. It turns the world into a series of symbols and possibilities. In those moments, the "wanting" feels like a superpower—a deep, resonant capacity to feel the world in high definition.

The Loneliness of Two

but then there is the weight. perhaps the heaviest version of yearning is the kind that happens when you aren’t actually alone.

there is a specific, private guilt in sitting across from someone you love—someone who is doing everything "right"—and still feeling that familiar pull toward the horizon. you’re in a relationship, you’re being held, and yet you are still searching for a phantom. It’s the realization that no person, no matter how wonderful, can fill a hole that is shaped like "elsewhere." It makes you feel like a ghost in your own home, hovering over a life you should be fully inhabited by, but can’t quite settle into.

The Music of the Void

beyond the quiet guilt of a relationship that doesn't "fill" you, there is the searing isolation of being truly alone with your imagination.

there are specific love songs—you know the ones—that I have to skip if I’m not prepared to be dismantled. When they play, it isn’t just a sentimental " yho i wish i had that." It’s a physical event. i can feel my insides start to burn with the friction of the life i’m living rubbing against the life i’m imagining.

in those four minutes of a chorus, i am living a different timeline. i can feel the empty space next to me like a physical weight; i can feel the phantom warmth of a hand that isn’t there. It’s a vivid, cinematic mirage of what "home" could feel like if it were a person. but when the song ends and the silence rushes back in, the burn doesn't just fade. it leaves a scorched earth behind.

The War With Self-Respect

for me yearning takes on a sharper, more jagged edge—especially when you are standing in the wreckage of a breakup that dismantled you.

when you’ve just come from something horrible, the yearning feels like a betrayal. you are trying to rebuild your house from the ashes, trying to tell yourself that you are enough on your own, yet your soul keeps gripping at the idea of someone else. it is soul-gripping, bone-deep, and incredibly confusing.

there is a profound sense of shame that comes with it. you feel like you are disrespecting your own self-respect. you know, logically, that you aren't fully healed yet. you know that the version of you who just walked out of that fire needs time and air. and yet, the yearning persists. it feels like you’re trying to run a marathon on a broken leg—disrespecting the part of you that is still bleeding because you are so desperate for the comfort of a finish line.

The Draining Dark

living in a state of "almost" is a full-time job. it takes energy to maintain these vivid hallucinations of companionship while simultaneously navigating a world that requires you to be a functional, independent adult.

Making Peace with the Reach

so, what do we do with a heart that is permanently tilted toward the horizon?

maybe the goal isn't to "cure" the yearning. maybe it’s about realizing that the ache is actually a compass. it tells me that I have a massive capacity for devotion, even if it hasn't found its final destination yet.

i am learning to sit with the burn of the love songs and the quiet of the empty spaces, not as a sign that i am "missing" something, but as proof that i am still looking. i am still here. i am still reaching. and perhaps, in the middle of all that yearning, the reaching itself is a kind of arrival.