I woke up to 43 tracks.

Three entire albums Iceman, Habibti, and Maid of Honour dumped onto the server at midnight like an overstuffed corporate data file. I sat looking at the screen, and I didn’t feel excitement; I just felt tired. And honestly, that shit hurt.

It hurt because I am 20 years old, and Drake’s music used to be the pillar of my confidence. My older brothers were the ones who introduced me to him, but If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late became entirely mine. I was a kid navigating an Afrikaans school, dealing with the quiet, fractured reality of divorced parents. Every morning, I’d watch the other kids get picked up and dropped off by their parents, while I had to walk. In those walks, that album was my armor. It was cold, sharp, and unshakeable. It gave me a sense of power when I felt completely exposed.

Back then, his confidence was terrifyingly real. The braggadocio was terrifying pulpable. But later that same year, closing out What a Time to Be Alive on “30 for 30 Freestyle,” there was a line where he reflected on his early days and rapped: “I can’t rap like that, all young and naive / Not after all of the shit I’ve seen and the things I believe.”

At the time, I thought it was just a cold bar about street politics, industry wealth, and growing up. Now, looking at the massive, icy corporate landfill of Iceman, I realize it was a diagnosis.

Michael Jackson warned us this would happen.

When MJ stood on that double-decker bus in London in 2002, publicly declaring war on Sony and Tommy Mottola, the media called him erratic and paranoid. But he was trying to hand us the architectural blueprint of the future. He warned us that major labels actively conspire to manipulate, undersell, and drain creators of their power once they get too big. He knew that when an artist reaches an astronomical magnitude under late-stage capitalism, the system steps in to financialize their output entirely.

There is no room left to be naive. There is no room to be the kid just making music that resonates on a lonely walk to school. You are no longer allowed to be an artist who sits in a room and curates a tight, 10-song masterpiece because the extractionary mechanics of corporations like UMG and Sony won’t allow it. To maintain that level of dominance or to clear the impossible hurdle of a multi-million-dollar backend quota you have to become calculated. You have to treat art like a war of attrition.

Iceman is the final, realized version of the corporate trap MJ warned us about. It’s not an artistic statement; it’s a data dump designed to flood the DSP algorithms, monopolize streaming real estate, and satisfy a contract. Drake is forced to use the same old tricks thrown aggressively at the wall, making the same song over and over because the machine demands predictable metrics.

But what hurts the most listening to newer Drake is realizing that Drake isn’t even confident in his own singing anymore. The crooning that used to feel effortless, intimate, and human now sounds completely drowned. It’s submerged in thick layers of Auto-Tune and heavy vocal processing, as if he’s hiding behind the technology because the genuine soul of it got drained somewhere along the line.

This is what happens when the infrastructure wins. As Vince Staples pointed out, labels have gutted the human element the A&Rs who used to protect the integrity of a record and replaced them with data sheets. The public gets distracted by the gladiatorial matches and the rap beefs, while the corporate giants quietly extract the wealth from the background.

Prince wrote “SLAVE” on his face, and MJ broke his silence to protect the sanctity of the music. But today, the extractionary system has won so completely that its biggest star can’t even fight back. Drake didn’t lose his talent; he lost the structural freedom to use it. Iceman is the cold reality of the modern music industry a king locked in a golden cage, drowning in Auto-Tune, throwing endless songs at a wall just to keep the machinery running, while the kids walking to school are left looking for a new armor.

I didn’t actually hear Blonde the first time I listened to it. I was too busy trying to make her hear it.

There is a specific kind of teenage hubris in forcing a girl to listen to “Nights.” Praying that she is gonna think I’m cool. I remember sitting there, waiting for the 3:30 mark to hit, holding my breath for the beat switch as if the sonic shift could somehow bridge the gap between us. She was a pastor’s kid, a two parent household kid, raised in the rigid geometry of Sunday mornings; I was the son of an agnostic father, drifting through a world with no fixed north, trying to find himself as a child of divorce coming home to an empty house. I wanted the music to explain me to her because I didn’t have the vocabulary yet.

“Round the city, round the clock...” the loop played, but she wasn’t circling with me. She didn’t care.

Funny enough, it was the breaking up that made the album connect. It was only when the room went silent that the lyrics started to have weight. I realized Blonde isn’t a soundtrack for a relationship; it’s a manual for the wreckage. I was suddenly the one in the song, realizing that “every night fucks every day up,” and that I was the only one left to deal with the sunrise.

By the time I hit my matric finals that December, the “yearning” had turned into something sharper. I had just gone through another breakup that flattened me right when I was supposed to be focusing on my future. But I had a job. I was getting paid weekly.

Suddenly, Hennessy became my new water.

Yoh sana, I was a groovist. If I couldn’t be the person she wanted, I would be the person everyone in the club noticed. I was trying to drown out the realization that I simply wasn’t “enough” for the person I loved. That was the final straw. I stopped praying for a dimension where I was taller and decided to become my own dimension. I was living the “Solo” lifestyle before I even understood the track. “Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven”. I was choosing my own version of hell as long as I could be the one in control of the temperature.

By first year of university, I was armored. I met a girl who finally “got” the album. We went to the beach at 2 AM, the air tasting like salt and cheap decisions, and we talked about our high school ghosts. I was lowkey obsessed, orbiting her world while she was still mourning a boy from her past.

“I’ll be your boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight,” Frank sang, and it felt like a prophecy of my own inadequacy. In the end, she never really chose me. I wasn’t much to her.

But when we eventually crashed and burned, I didn’t feel the old weight. I found my exit strategy in “Self Control.” I leaned into the realization: “I wish we were taller in other dimensions.” It was the ultimate relief. It wasn’t my fault; it was just the physics of our reality. I wasn’t too small; the dimension was just too narrow. Frank taught me that I could free myself. He taught me that love comes and goes, but the self is indestructible.

Reflecting on it now, I realize I’ve done a lot of bleaching. A lot of blonding.

The act of creating, the writing, the designing, the constant shifting is my version of bleaching and dyeing. I love change because I can’t hide my ambition to become “taller.” I’m trying to manufacture the growth I haven’t felt yet. I’ve dyed my hair, cleared my skin, made some money for young person in Cyril’s economy and bought new clothes, but the chemicals never changed much about how I feel inside. I’m still that kid in the empty house, just with a better playlist and a sharper armor.

But it was “Futura Free” that finally made the logic click. That sprawling, nine-minute conclusion taught me that people are just chapters. “I’ma let my nuts hang / Now I’m finally laughing,” Frank says, looking back at the struggle from a place of detached peace.

I realized that everyone I’ve loved was just a character in a specific section of my timeline. When I sabotage a relationship, I’m not just being destructive; I’m just turning the page because I can feel the ink running dry. I’ve mastered the art of being “Solo” so well that I’ve turned my solitude into a fortress.

The beat switch on “Nights” used to be a bridge I hoped someone would cross to find me. Now, it’s a scheduled departure. I know the route, I know the destination, and I’m the only one with a ticket. I’m no longer waiting for the beat to drop,I’m the one who times it.

I’m 20 now. Hopefully, I grow out of this whole thing, the sabotage, the armor, the need to be the one who leaves first. But until then, shoutout to Frank. You really heard me when you made that album.

I used to wish we were taller. Now, I’m just glad I’ve built a world where I’m the only one who can reach the lights. I know exactly when to turn them off. I know exactly when the chapter is done.

We often speak of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a closed door a grand, heavy mahogany thing that swung shut in 1998, sealing away the ghosts of our past so we could walk, unburdened, into the light. But for those whose names were never called, or whose killers found refuge in the fine print of jurisdiction, that door didn’t close. It just locked from the inside.

To look at the case of Stopforth and Veenendaal is to see the legal machinery working at its most clinical. Here were men who sought the sanctuary of the TRC for blood spilled in Namibia, only to find that the law has a very specific geography. The court ruled that their violence was “extraterritorial” a crime outside the lines of our national reconciliation. While legally sound, this case highlights a broader, more haunting reality: the law is obsessed with borders, but trauma is not.

When we shift our gaze from those who were denied amnesty to the victims who were promised justice in return for their silence, the landscape becomes even more jagged. We are currently witnessing a slow motion earthquake in our judiciary. Decades after the “Cradock Four” were intercepted at a roadblock, we are finally hearing the creak of the gallows not necessarily for the perpetrators, many of whom have escaped into the quiet of the grave, but for the institutions that allowed the clock to run out.

You

Take the case of Caiphus Nyoka. It took until late 2025 for a 12-man execution squad to finally face a verdict. For nearly forty years, his family lived in the “Architecture of Indifference”—a space where the state didn’t necessarily deny the crime, but simply refused to acknowledge the urgency of the wound. This isn’t just a failure of the NPA; it is a sociological choice. To delay justice for Nokuthula Simelane or Ahmed Timol for forty years is to bank on the hope that eventually, the witnesses will die, the evidence will rot, and the public will lose its appetite for the truth.

The “Unfinished Business” cases over 300 of them are more than just a backlog of files. They are a mirror reflecting our own selective memory. When the Khampepe Commission probes why these cases were suppressed, they aren’t just looking for rogue investigators; they are looking for the moment we decided that some lives were too politically expensive to avenge.

We are working backwards now. We are trying to reconstruct a house of justice using only the rubble that remains. From the PEBCO Three to the Highgate Massacre, the narrative is the same: a promise made in the nineties that was quietly retracted in the two thousands.

As we sit in 2026, watching these inquests reopen, we have to ask: Is this reconciliation, or is it just the late-stage management of ghosts? We are finally naming the killers, but we are doing it in rooms where the victims’ parents have already passed away. The justice we are finding now is cold; it is a clinical post-mortem of a struggle that deserved the heat of a live trial.

If the TRC was our foundation, these unfinished cases are the cracks we tried to hide with a rug. But the cracks have grown into chasms, and we are realizing that you cannot build a stable future on a ground that is still hiding its dead. We are going to keep digging, not because we want to live in the past, but because the past refuses to stop living in us.

It’s a cheap, yellow kind of hunger. You’re sitting there at a cracked table with a plate of eggs and fries. On their own, they’re just fuel. Ukudla nje. They’re the kind of meal you eat because you haven’t died yet and the stomach doesn’t care about poetry.

But then you shake that yellow dust over the grease. Izinto zyalunga. Suddenly, the room doesn’t feel so gray. It turns a miserable meal into something you’d fight for. That’s her. She adds a spice to the day.

But when she’s gone? Kuduma konke. The fries are just cold, starchy fingers. You go through the motions, but it isn’t amazing. Without her, life is an unseasoned, lukewarm plate of nothing.

I wonder if this is isidliso , Ubuthi waGogo supposedly also was hit with Isdliso.I think I’m trapped, that she’s got me under some heavy, supernatural spell. I know there’s a way out, that I should seek the cure. inyama yengwenya angiyifuni—I don’t want the crocodile meat. I don’t want the antidote.

Why would I want to be “cured” of the only thing that makes this life taste like something? Before her, everything was mundane, a flat line of gray days and unseasoned eggs. Now, I laugh more. I feel lighter, like the gravity of this world finally decided to give me a break. That heavy, dormant furnace inside me? It’s lit again. My burning desire is back, screaming for more than just survival.

If this is a potion, let it burn. If I’m losing my mind, at least I’m losing it with a smile on my face and a fire in my gut.

Impilo ayifani uma engekho. I’m not looking for a way out. I’m just looking for more Aromat. Uyisandla sompheki and I’ve never been one for eating clean anyway.

I sat in church this past weekend, and I felt like fraud, I could barely recognize myself.

I sat in the pew and listened to stories of a “White Jesus” from ancient, distant lands—a figure we are told to center our entire existence around. In the world of institutional Christianity, we are often encouraged to look upward and forward, rarely backward. We are told the dead are gone, that we should leave the past to the past, and focus on a grace that transcends the physical. But as a Black man in this country, that request feels like a quiet kind of violence. My identity isn’t just built on hope; it is built on the foundation of those who were sacrificed for the ground I’m standing on.

I am 20 years old. I am at the age where I am just starting to figure out what my hands can build. And as I sat there, I couldn’t stop doing the math of our martyrs.

• Jesus was 33 when he was crucified for our souls.

• Solomon Mahlangu was 22 when he was hung for our land.

• And here I am, 20.

I am only two years younger than Mahlangu was when he walked toward those gallows in 1979. At an age where I am navigating my own future, he was already an operative of Umkhonto we Sizwe, returning from training to face an empire that saw him as sub-human. He didn’t go because he wanted to be a monument; he went because the soil was screaming.

The apartheid government didn’t just take his life; they staged his death to commemorate the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. They tried to use his execution to validate an invasion, attempting to drown out our claim to the land with the sound of a dropping trapdoor. They used the rope to try and make us forget.

I struggle with my faith because I fear that if I fully believe in this White God, my Black hands will be washed away. I fear that the “purity” they preach is just a code for a whiteness that has no room for my history or my ancestors. If my faith requires me to forget the gallows in Pretoria to focus on the cross in Calvary, then that faith is a crime. It is a tool of erasure that asks me to trade my memory for a sanitized peace.

I’m not saying Christianity is a bad thing—after all, I was just there. But I have to acknowledge that it has often functioned as a cloth designed to wipe the blood off the hands of history.

I refuse that trade.

As I struggle to keep my faith, but I am going to carry my martyrs with me. I won’t allow “ancient times” to overshadow the very real, very recent blood spilled on this soil. There is a ten-year gap between Solomon and Jesus, but in the pews, that gap feels like an ocean. We’ve made one a God and the other a “political figure” for the history books. But I’m letting those numbers sit with me. 33 is the age of divinity, but 22 is the age of a brother. A peer. A kid who should have had fifty more years but chose to give them to me instead.

I am carrying his final words out of that church and into my life: “My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight.”

I am the fruit of that tree. If I am a Christian, but I’ll be a Black one first one who knows that if my religion doesn’t have room for the 22-year-old who died for my right to exist, then it doesn’t have room for me. I will never forget who they hung, who they shot, and who they tortured. My freedom was bought twice: once on a hill in Calvary, and once on the gallows by a man who loved us enough to die before he even reached 23.

The dialogue between men and women in our current social climate is often less of a conversation and more a collision of survival strategies. Recently, I conducted a series of interviews with my homies , asking them to describe the opposite gender in three words and expand on their choices. What I found wasn’t just a list of grievances, but a profound empathy gap.

We have become so consumed by our own methods of enduring the world that we have lost the ability to consider the cost of the other person’s endurance. By weaving the voices of my homies from Sesule’s “seasonal” women to Mbali’s “reactive” men into the frameworks of Chinua Achebe, bell hooks, and Amahle Gebane, we see a cycle of mutual erasure that defines our relationships today.

I. My Homeboys fear “seasonal woman”

In my research, the men Sesule, Anele, and Aphile unanimously identified women through a lens of instability and calculation. Sesule’s observation that women are “seasonal” is particularly striking. He notes that “woman don’t know what they want... they move with how they feel.” To the male observer, this fluidity is seen as a threat to his stability. He asks: how can you provide for someone when the “season” of their needs changes tomorrow?

This mirrors the world of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where the protagonist Okonkwo’s rigid masculinity cannot tolerate anything that shifts. To a man who defines himself by the “Signal” a fixed, unwavering broadcast of strength and titles the “Soil” of femininity seems dangerously inconsistent. Aphile takes this further, calling women “serpents” and “disingenuous,”.Vu highlights a world where “indoda must” (a man must) provide, while the women “pretend” to get what they want.

This creates a “Transactional Trap.” Men feel that if they must provide the izinkomo (wealth/status), the “seasonal” nature of women makes the investment feel high-risk. They label women as manipulative because they recognize that women know the value of their emotions and use them as leverage. As Charles Bukowski demonstrates in Women, the male gaze often views a woman’s emotional complexity as an “inconvenient drain” on his own “gritty” suffering, rather than a legitimate struggle of its own.

II. My homegirls call to question the “focus” of men

However, the women I interviewed Mbali, Nia, Naledi, and Kamryn offer a powerful counter critique. They don’t see “logic-driven” men; they see “reactive beings” who have simply rebranded their emotions to fit a powerful aesthetic.

Mbali notes that while we are sold the idea that men are logical, their “impulse tends to lead the way.” She points out that outbursts, tantrums, and violence are all emotions, yet men rebrand this as “power” or “what being a man looks like.” Nia adds to this, describing men as “emotionally illiterate” or “emotionally immature.” She argues that men struggle with consideration because it isn’t fostered among them. Their “tunnel vision,” while productive, often leads to a “bulldozing” of the people around them.

This is the “psychic self-mutilation” bell hooks warns about in The Will to Change. Because men aren’t taught to process fear or hurt, they convert every feeling into the only acceptable masculine currency: Anger. The “grit” that Kamryn and Amile identified is real, but it comes at the cost of what Nia calls a “Strong Resolve” born out of emotional illiteracy. Men won’t “fuck up anything that will fuck them up,” resulting in a self-centeredness that leaves the people around them suffering in the wake of their tunnel vision.

III. Is my homegirl Naledi , Amahle Gebane???

One of the most modern insights came from Naledi, who identified a “dependency on homeboy validation.” She observes that men’s behaviors are often shaped by how they believe their peers will react, rather than their own judgment. This aligns perfectly with Amahle Gebane’s analysis of “Grootmanism” the idea that a man’s worth is tied to his financial status and the approval of the “boys.”

Naledi also points out that men “equate financial status with personal value.” When a man’s only measure of success is his bank balance or “baller culture,” he becomes insecure (as Andrea and Sesule both noted). He focuses on “self-preservation” because he feels that if his financial “Signal” fails, his identity as a man vanishes. This creates a shift away from traditional masculine values of responsibility and toward a modern definition of “being him” a narcissistic douchebaggery, as Kamryn described it, that lacks humble roots.

IV. Anele raises the Paradox of resilience

Despite the heavy critiques, there was a shared acknowledgment of a unique kind of strength. Anele offered a profound insight that serves as the pivot for this study. He calls women Resilient. > “Woman go thru alot but they always get thru it despite feeling more and never let them stop from feeling.” — Anele

This is the core of the “Missing Consideration.” While Sesule and Aphile see “emotionality” as a weakness or a tool for manipulation, Anele recognizes it as a form of endurance.

Men admire women’s resilience but call it “manipulation” when they don’t understand the emotional “seasons” driving it. Women admire men’s grit but call it “narcissism” when it lacks consideration for the collective. We are observing the same traits but through a glass darkly.

V. Reflection: To be loved is to be seen

The most damning part of these interviews is the sense that both sides feel like they are being “hustled” or “unseen” by the other.

• Men feel unconsidered because they feel the heavy weight of “indoda must.” They feel that their “insecurity” about their role in a changing world is ignored. They seek validation from “homeboys” because they feel their internal sacrifices aren’t valued unless they result in a payout.

• Women feel unconsidered because they feel “bulldozed” by male tunnel vision. They feel that their “resilience” the act of feeling while continuing is treated as a “seasonal” inconvenience or a “deceptive” tactic rather than the very thing keeping the world stable.

As Kamryn suggests, there is a need for men to be “more humble,” but as Naledi noted, this lack of humility is often a mask for a “lack of clear identity” as men move away from traditional foundations into a modern world of social media comparisons and “Henny on Henny”.

Conclusion: We need to See each other to love each other

We are living in a state of defensive armor. Men use “tunnel vision” and “financial status” to protect themselves from feeling “drained.” Women use “resilience” and “navigation” to protect themselves from being “bulldozed.”

Until men consider that a woman’s “seasonal” emotions are actually a sophisticated way of processing a heavy world, and until women consider that a man’s “narcissism” is often a terrified mask for a lack of identity, we will remain invisible to each other.

As bell hooks suggests, we must stop looking at each other as categories the Serpent, the Narcissist, the Grootman and start looking at the cost of the performance. The “gritty” man and the “resilient” woman are both exhausted. It’s time we stopped performing for the “homeboys” or the “seasons” and started considering the person standing right in front of us.

So yesterday I was heading to someone’s birthday dinner needed a haircut asap but it was busy so I slide down to my old barber (yes I cheat on my barber ) fuck what you think.

So I get there after the mundane how are you doing he asks me what happened to that girl who would leave scratches on my neck. I was like woahhh gang chilllll. I said she’s moved abroad and we haven’t really spoken cause we just don’t vibe anymore. He asked did she tell me she was leaving I said bro I just saw when she was gone man wasn’t really that invested.

Truth, is I did like her, but she was a lil crazy and she had some questionable behavior like I don’t feel like she was with me and her ex, but we weren’t officially together so whatever. She tried to rekindle our relationship, but I just didn’t feel the spark anymore or rather I feel like she wanted to be with me for extension of me rather than me but that’s a Substack for another day.

so, the conversation leans to you can’t let a woman make it so easy to leave you or move on for you. A woman must be pledged to like the gods of the river , you should leave a coin … his words not mine this Congolese nigga overly tripping in my head right now.

He proclaimed that in sex I’m taking away something from her or she’s giving to me which ayyy man I feel like it’s more an equal exchange and I feel like I give more of myself in the deed 7 times outta 10 but sure if that’s the frame of logic.

He said the love of a woman has to be kept together by something more than intimacy there should be some type of dependency she has on you so she can stay.

I feel like nah that’s paying for pussy I do gestures of kindness but no money is leaving my banking app to go to yours and no cash will be exchanged between you and I,if we are romantic partners in anyways.

But truth be told man I get it but I can’t be bothered for a woman to be attached to anything besides who I actually am so many times people fall in love with who my parents are , my work , what I have , who I know , going out with me but just not meeting me with who I am.

But I know the patriarchy thrives on people being dependent on you as a man but I want no parts on it I’d rather be alone that do all that shit for real but hey to each is own.

I am writing to you from a future that looks like the one you warned us about, but it has been dressed in the expensive silks of a “democracy” that feels more like a funeral. I have to tell you that the “mass hypnosis” you fought to break has only deepened. We are living in a South Africa that doesn’t just suffer from erosion; it thrives on it. The “speed of being taken out of selfhood” is so fast now that our people don’t even realize they are being hollowed out. We have become “traffic” a system operating on the friction of its own displacement where the individual is a ghost and the community is just a collection of units waiting to be processed.

Baba, the architecture of our lives is still built on the skeleton of Apartheid. We inherited a house of bones, and instead of burning it down, our own people

the ones who claim to lead us have simply repainted the walls. There is a lethal classism now within the Black community that would break your heart. A thin layer of the “liberated” elite has become the new buffer for global capital, using the West as their only unit of measurement. They look at the masses not as brothers, but as a liability. They have adopted the gaze of the oppressor, ensuring that we remain fragmented and easier to manage. While we are distracted by this internal war for status, other races still do not see us as equals; they simply watch us participate in our own self-erasure from the sidelines.

The forces against us are no longer just the police in the streets, but the very air we breathe and the food we eat. Our government has become a predator. We are witnessing a war on our biology where the “cheap food” flooding our townships unregulated and birthed from the desperation of illegal immigration is literally killing our children. It is a “Prison Industrial Complex” of the gut. The system poisons the child, profits from the illness, and then uses a complicit media to point the finger at our neighbors from other African countries. They stoke xenophobia to hide the fact that they allowed our standards to erode to the point of lethality. We are being eaten from the inside out by a neo-imperialism that treats our borders as invisible and our bodies as disposable resources.

Even our culture, the very soul you told us to protect, is under siege by those meant to guard it. We have a Minister of Sport, Arts, and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, who seems to loathe the very spirit of our artists. He is more interested in shaming our creators and aligning himself with Zionist ideologies and Western geopolitical interests than in nurturing the South African heart. By removing support for our artists, he is helping the system finish the job of cultural erasure. He is telling us that our music and our stories are not “productive” unless they serve a foreign agenda.

As Karl Marx once noted about the alienation of the worker, we have been completely estranged from our own essence. Our righteous anger is funneled into internal violence, and our sadness is sold back to us in a bottle by a liquor industry that is the only thing the government allows to flourish in the townships. We are told we have to “earn” happiness, as if joy is a commodity we have to buy back from the people who stole it.

Grootman, the “most potent weapon” is still the mind, but it is being bombarded by a thousand new signals every day. We are caught in a cycle of self-oppression, convinced that our helplessness is our natural state. I am writing this to tell you that the struggle hasn’t ended; it has just become invisible. We are still trying to find the “Self” in a country that is desperate to see us disappear.

With a heavy heart but a wakeful mind,

One of your ntwanaz.

So before she came over to my house I was always skeptical of her I just felt like she was full of shit she just seemed to believe everything I said which I felt like I was being sold the world but when she came past my sliding door. We chilled in my room and played video games on my iPad we were both nerds.

Eventually we started kissing and rubbing onto each other like burnt tires. I grabbed a handful of your rump which still left much uncovered. Doing such was always a tall task with you.

You gave a lacklustre attempt at giving me head which left me very much disappointed but I had a soft spot for you so I pretended to enjoy it.

then I said it “why don’t you let me do it?”

now I’m also genuinely scared in this situation cause I never really enjoyed doing it with my last partner but I tied the liver her Pussy was beautiful it was like something you would see on a charcuterie board.

Now my first instinct was to kiss it and when I tell you this was like a lamza you see at a wedding day. I would breathe under hood and she would arch like bridge. Every time my younger caressed her labia she sent her inside my back. It was like I was unsealing her. My face was squashed like a watermelon by her thighs. But I was addicted

I knew I was in control anything caused a reaction out of her the only thing that even felt genuine was those moments the passionate make out session contained but it was something that was taking place downstairs. I knew I had her where I wanted I brought out the fingers my thumb rubbed counter clockwise sending vibrations down to her ankles but I kept out me kiss going I couldn’t see my self stopping.

then I felt her grab my head and she pulled me deeper into her portal but this is a portal I unlocked mannnn.

I finally had her figured out I finally cracked the code to her this was the only time I ever felt seen.

This was my dimension

So she tells me she’s about to … I don’t take it serious I continue my dj session I don’t like my sets interrupted I sped up the bpm and our set came to a huge interrupted when she came all over my sheets now it would of been better if she was a creamer but saying she was a squirted was a disservice to what actually took place was a geyser. I was in awe of what I was able to do only man I even heard create these type of things was the man in the big black book who works in the sky . So when a young nigga like me was out conducting such sorcery even she looked at like I was some great prophet or something…it did something to my ego knowing I could do that I started to finally feel comfortable there was an imposter syndrome I had like she was too pretty for me or this is too good to be true but that day was confirmation that I was genuinely built for that shit

.

Mari Ye Phepha Still Runs the Streets

There’s this old poem called “Mari Ye Phepha” by Musaemura Zimunya and honestly, it still shayas a broer hard today. The title means “paper money,” but it’s about more than that if you peep it closer. It’s about how chelete controls everything love, sex, respect, even self-cav. And when you look at South Ah right now, it feels like Zimunya saw it coming. We’re living in that reality.

if we keeping it real: money and relationships are tied tighter than ever. The whole “Grootman and slay queen ’’ and ‘‘stocko and bhari’’ broers will even call a hunnie you like a ‘‘emphahla’’ this thing isn’t something small niggas can just gloss over it’s a reflection of how deep the economy affects love. Some people act like these girls are gold-diggers, but it’s not that simple. The cost of living is mad, jobs are scarce, and many young women are just trying to survive in a world that doesn’t give them many options. It’s hard to focus on love when you’re worrying about rent, groceries, or even data. So sometimes, money becomes part of the equation not because of greed, but because of survival. And that deserves empathy, not judgment.

But it’s not only the girls who feel the pressure. A lot of young broers are breaking themselves trying to keep up trying to spoil their girlfriends, buy them nice things, or just not look broke. There’s this silent competition to prove your worth through your wallet. Guys feel embarrassed if they can’t provide, even when they’re struggling too. The whole thing becomes a cycle everyone chasing mari ye phepha, everyone pretending they’re okay.

Social media doesn’t make it easier. Every day you see “soft life” posts designer bags, champagne, beach pictures, vacations, stupid low exposure sushi. And while it looks good, it’s also toxic sometimes. It makes people feel like they’re behind, like love and happiness only count if they come with money and aesthetic. But behind the filters, many people are fighting anxiety, debt, and loneliness. It’s all mari ye phepha flashy but fragile.

That’s why Zimunya’s poem still matters. It reminds us that while money can make life comfortable, it can also steal our peace, our empathy, and our sense of self. It’s a mirror to how we live today chasing paper instead of purpose.

So maybe the message isn’t just “money is bad.” Maybe it’s this: don’t let mari ye phepha make you forget who you are, or how to love. Because at the end of the day, whether you’ve got millions or cents, what we all want is to be seen, respected, and loved for real.