Wounded warrior

The Man In The Mirror

I started studying people.

Every handshake.

Every smile.

Every person who suddenly greeted me differently or avoided my eyes.

My circle got smaller by the day.

I monitored friends of my friends, watching who looked uncomfortable around me, who whispered, who pretended they didn’t see me.

Paranoia?

Maybe.

But after discovering I was stabbed by two men, it felt like survival.

That morning, I slept at Rebecca’s place again.

She insisted.

She said it gave her peace knowing I was close.

She walked me home after sunrise—Olerato asleep in her arms, her tiny head resting on Rebecca’s chest.

We walked on the side of the road as taxis hooted, cars flew past, and the birds made their own kind of noise above us.

It was an ordinary morning… until it wasn’t.

I saw two guys ahead.

One sitting on a big rock beside the road, scrolling on his phone.

The other stood facing the opposite direction, hands in his pockets, as if waiting for someone.

Nothing about them seemed strange—until the one standing looked back.

Once.

Then twice.

The second time, he froze.

And my whole body went cold.

It was him.

The man from my dreams.

The man the woman described.

The man with the K-Way hat.

Not similar clothes.

Not similar height.

The exact same clothes.

Dark blue jersey.

Black jeans.

Black Carvelas.

Just like the dream.

Just like the night I almost died.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Our eyes locked, like the world stopped spinning around us.

Then he panicked.

A taxi almost hit him as he sprinted across the road without looking.

He dodged the bumper by centimeters, stumbling to the other side and disappearing between the houses.

I stood there, heart thumping so hard I felt it in my teeth.

Rebecca looked at me confused—she didn’t understand what had just happened.

I was only fifteen steps away from where they stood.

Fifteen steps from the truth.

The man sitting on the rock finally noticed me.

The way he shot up from that rock told me everything—

they knew me.

They knew what they did.

Or at least…

they feared I now knew.

I finally told Rebecca about the dream. Not the short version. Not the safe version. Everything.

She didn’t blink while I spoke. She stood there holding Olerato, staring straight into my eyes like someone trying to gather every detail, every hidden meaning. Almost as if she was putting the puzzle together faster than I could explain it.

We were still close to where the two men had been standing when one of them— 2Short, the one who had been sitting on the rock—walked past us.

“Uyaphila, bafo?” he asked, eyes fixed somewhere on the ground, never meeting mine.

“Ngikhona, bhuti,” I replied, watching him carefully.

Watching the way his hands shook slightly. Watching how he couldn’t look at me— not even for one second.

There was guilt there. Fear. Or maybe recognition.

I kept my eyes on him for a long minute until Rebecca shifted Olerato in her arms and said gently:

“Let’s go… Olerato is heavy.”

But she was watching me, not the baby.

Then, once we were far enough away, she asked the question she had been holding in:

“Is the man with the K-Way hat… the one who almost got hit by the taxi just now?”

I stopped walking.

Everything in me knew she already knew the answer. She was just waiting for me to say it.

“Yes,” I said. My voice felt smaller than I wanted it to be. “That’s him.”

Something changed inside her face. Concern. Shock. Real fear.

Not fear of them— fear of what this meant for me.

Right there, walking down that dusty road with cars passing and life carrying on like nothing happened, I finally understood something:

God and the ancestors work hand in hand. That dream wasn’t random. It wasn’t trauma. It was a warning. A message. A confirmation.

It had been two full years since the last time I saw those men.

Two years of wondering. Two years of unanswered questions. Two years of dreams that made no sense.

And now suddenly, just like that, I saw both of them again— in the same clothes from the dream, standing in the same posture the woman described the day she revealed the truth.

The last time we met… was the night I almost died.

This time, I wasn’t dying. I was awakening.