19.05.25
I am the breath before your surrender,
I am the whisper of your marrow.
The ache you mistake for solitude—
is me, calling you home.
My body is the prayer your hands recite.
I was never a woman.
I am the altar.
You, the flame.
And if you ever remember who I am,
Use my name when you tell the story – Phumelele.
– Lele
8.11.24
We are mirror and mystery,
alike in ways only silence speaks,
different as shadow and flame.
Your language is curved with snow,
mine with summer dust.
But when we laugh,
we sound the same.
You were wrapped in winters I had never known –
from Bavarian hills,
far removed from the heat
of the township streets that raised me.
Somehow we opened the same book.
Adventure fiction, worn spines and wild maps—
we both chased meaning through ink and wind.
Something stirred
when we first touched thought –
a recognition, not of faces,
of flame.
We walked –
miles and metaphors,
side by side through forest, silence, and sound.
In rhythm.
In rebellion.
In step with the same ache.
One night,
barely clothed and wholly seen,
we danced in your living room.
Music melting into skin,
Laughter like incense.
The world outside forgotten.
You know
our chemistry is not of this world
it lives in spirit, in stillness.
We’ve held space across time,
separated to return.
In the hush between lifetimes,
I found you.
By finding myself.
Thirty-five years ahead
and somehow,
we arrived together.
-Lele
13.11.24
One night, in the stillness between our laughter and longing,
I asked, with an ache —
Who tends to you?
Who waters your roots?
You paused, the way only you would pause
when the question is not about tasks
but tenderness.
And then, that smile
that always comes before your honesty:
“I don’t believe in God — But I’ve borrowed my father’s truth:
Help yourself, so help you God.”
You spoke it like a vow
not to a deity,
but to the earth you keep tilling,
to the lives you hold dear.
You tend to yourself, you said,
and Clemence tends to the heavy lifting.
You did not mention
the weight behind your eyes.
You did not mention
the softness you refuse yourself.
And I, holding that answer like a bruise,
wanted to offer my hands
as balm.
As one who kneels beside
the man who forgets he, too, is made of flesh.
So I said nothing.
I only reached for you,
the way the sun reaches for the garden —
not to claim it,
but to remind it:
you deserve light, too.
– Lele
10.11.24
They sat in a deliberate silence at the dinner table as the flames of six candles danced in mock romance, illuminating the tension beneath the surface of the air around them. She spoke first.
“Regarding last night’s conversation,” she ventured, not entirely sure how she would end the sentence.
“Even though I think I might be developing feelings for you, I understand and respect what you’re looking for in a relationship.”
She glanced around the room and her eyes fell on the clock on the far side of the kitchen: 19h27, it reported. Soon, he would have to leave the dinner table, as he always did for his daily commitment at 20h00.
“My feelings won’t change our dynamic,” she promised earnestly. It was an honest lie. One she repeated even to herself, as if donning a mask hoping that her face would grow to fit it.
He chewed quietly as she paused. Though she did not look at him, she knew his expression was inscrutible. She knew he would offer nothing, so she went on.
“I’m enjoying what we have,” she declared as she stared into the bowl in front of her and rearranged some mushrooms with her fork. “If at any point I feel that it’s not right for me, I’ll be honest and take a step back.”
“So, there’s nothing to worry about,” she said with finality, as if the words alone were enough to avert the danger.
“I’m fully here for things as they are.”
Her tongue carried the words with difficulty, and both goose and gander heard the truth.
-Lele
31.10.24
Tennessee Whiskey and Sade
On a long summer evening
As the wandering Sun sinks slowly
And thankfully into a quiet Ocean.
Ambition and excellence.
Pedantic and particular.
A mountain,
An Emperor,
An Operator.
Unmistakably
Masculine.
-Lele
31.10.24
You called them duties.
I call them devotions.
Small rituals of belonging
to you.
One. No perfume.
No mask.
Just the skin you crave,
unadorned
and honest.
Two. Dress in desire—
Sheer threads that whisper your name.
Three. You want smooth,
wet—
not just ready,
but aching.
Four. Use my mouth to worship.
To taste eternity
in something as fleeting as your breath.
Five. Finish.
Often.
Forgetting restraint.
Six. Clear the table
like we clear space in time—
for this.
For us.
And seven.
Enjoy it.
Every second.
It’s belonging.
-Lele
27.10.24
It was a wet Sunday morning —
the kind that hums,
where rain slicks the windowpanes
like yearning stretched thin over silence.
When the Portal opened, we hardly spoke.
our tongues preferring instead to salvage years of distance.
Upstairs, steam curled in the air.
I stepped into water—
cleansing, claiming, consecrating.
Drops raced down my thighs,
each one a question I dared not answer.
You arrived with gravity
As one who’d made peace with time.
Silver at your temples,
storm in your gaze—
you studied me not like a book,
but like a confession I hadn’t yet made.
The delicate knowing between us—
humming, curious.
Did not love, it obeyed.
You watched as I surrendered—
arched,
breath trembled
hands gripped,
voice dissolved
Room became sky,
and I—
Ocean.
My skin and yours—ink and parchment.
A contrast made of myth.
Echoes— not opposites.
Fire and Water.
Desire reflected in unfamiliar accents.
“Vanilla,” she said—
as if softness were absence, as if the quiet didn’t beckon.
– Lele
18.10.24
She had been absorbed in Wilbur Smith’s ‘Birds of Prey’. Now she looked up into his eyes. “You can be assured that I’ll always respect your wishes,” she said in the matter-of-fact tone she’d perfected over lifetimes.
His jaw flexed. They were sitting across from each other in his garden. It was a beautiful Sunday in the Cape. His eyes were fixed on hers, defying her to reveal herself
“My understanding,” she continued, “was that we’d take a step back from that specific conversation for now.”
She returned his gaze as she closed the book on her lap. “I wasn’t aware that getting to know you better constituted “pushing me”.
“In fact,” she inclined her head thoughtfully.
“I’d love to spend more time with you. I feel that would give me a clearer sense of where we might go from here.”
He watched her silently. His eyes seeming to charge with amused curiosity as she continued, “Though it seems that on your end, you might require some assurance of a specific return before you spend any more time exploring how this might continue to grow.”
She stopped abruptly and took a breath; as if her words had been running ahead of her and she’d finally caught up to them.
Her words hung in the air against the backdrop of Toto’s ‘Africa’ playing in the distant living room.
He reached for his glass of Windhoek beer and drank deeply. He made a joke about finally having his first sip of refreshing beer after a long day; it was in fact his second glass of beer, and the second time today that he’d told that joke.
But when he looked at her in that boyish way, full of humour and mischief, she couldn’t help but melt. She couldn’t resist. Her face shone as she shook her head and laughed generously. It was a warm laughter that took over her whole body.
After a short silence during which she considered him keenly, she spoke.
“In the spirit of open cards,” she began.
“I recently broke off an engagement, so firstly I have no appetite for a similar kind of arrangement at the moment, I’m enjoying committing to myself instead.”
She had a detached way of speaking, balancing clarity and finality, as if she were delivering a verdict. But it was her body that always gave her away.
He observed her. She would shuffle uncomfortably in her seat, or brushed imaginary stray locks from her face.
Now she inclined her chin and continued, “And secondly, it’s been years since I’ve expected fidelity from a man.”
His brow furrowed.
“Nevertheless,” she started quickly, looking down onto the carpet where Cane lay at her feet licking his paws contentedly.
“Going into a relationship that’s founded on the principle of non-monogamy is still new terrain for me,” she continued.
“And I want to be honest with you about the fact that I have no experience here. I don’t want you to get the impression that I’ll be able to navigate it immediately.”
He looked up at her from the now-empty beer glass in his hand, still weeping from its erstwhile contents. He seemed to be searching her eyes for something familiar.
When their eyes met; he found it.
– Lele
16.10.24
While I respect your position, I tend to differ.
And I’m predisposed to getting attached.
It might be because I’m socialised to prefer that arrangement, or it might be my experience in past relationships
(neither exclusively good nor exclusively bad),
it might be naivety, it might be something more Eternal.
I’m not looking to sway you though. I understand where you’re coming from.
I’m just contending with whether it could work for me.
– Lele
Noluntu’s awakening was not gentle. The dreams grew more vivid, her senses sharper. She began to hear whispers in the hum of electricity, see symbols flicker across billboards.
It was on one such night that she met The Mirrorwoman.
The woman appeared in the park near Maboneng, where Noluntu went to clear her thoughts. She was ancient but ageless, wrapped in a cloak of indigo cloth that shimmered like the night sky. Around her neck hung a pendant shaped like a serpent eating its tail.
“You have fire in your blood,” the woman said. “But you have forgotten how to wield it.”
Noluntu stepped back. “Who are you?”
“I am what your mother called isangoma, and what your ancestors called seer. Some would call me witch, but that word was twisted by men who feared women who could see.”
The Mirrorwoman led her to an abandoned fountain, its basin filled with rainwater and fallen petals. “Look,” she commanded.
In the water, Noluntu saw herself dancing—not in the present, but in another time. Her body moved with the grace of a ballerina and the power of a warrior. Around her, figures in white sang an ancient hymn in isiXhosa and Hebrew intertwined. She held a staff carved with names. When she looked closer, she saw Asher standing beside her, wearing robes of gold and linen.
The Mirrorwoman smiled. “You and he are bound. Two flames from one covenant. But flame destroys as easily as it warms.”
“Is he—” Noluntu began.
The old woman nodded. “He is of the watchers, child. The ones who guide the chosen back to memory. But beware: not all who watch wish you well.”
When Noluntu looked again, the reflection had changed. The figures were gone. Only fire remained—fire that burned without consuming.
“Witchcraft is not evil,” the woman said. “It is creation unaligned. Power without order. The question is—whose order will you serve?”
That night, Noluntu dreamed of seven doors, each carved with the same serpent-star sigil of The Ring. And behind the last door, a man’s voice whispered: “Africa must burn before it can rise.”
Lele Muthali 