I pray for my homies
A good friend of mine always brings up this interview. He mentions it whenever we talk about Africa, about success, about making it. He cannot remember who was interviewing who, but the line stuck. Someone said “let alone pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, people in Africa do not even have the boots.”
It sounds like an insult. Maybe it was meant as one. But that does not make it untrue.
You have to pull yourself out of the generational mud you were born into. And the mud is thick. It is not your fault that you are in it. Being born is the original trouble. Emil Cioran said that “we do not choose to be born, and we do not choose to die. We are thrown into existence without our consent.” He spent his whole life circling that fact like a planet around a dying star. The trouble is not that life is hard. The trouble is that you never asked to be here in the first place.
(but here you are anyway, and the mud does not care about your consent)
So you struggle. You fall. You tumble. You get back up. You do it again. And the interesting thing is that none of this is visible in the moments you spend with your homies. The laughter, the food, the music, the stupid jokes about nothing. That is not where the struggle lives.
The struggle lives in the gaps. The hours between 2 AM and 5 AM when you are alone and nothing is happening and the only person watching is you.
There is a question that follows you into those gaps: who are you when no one is looking?
When there is no audience, no validation, no external proof that you exist. When you are just a body in a room with your thoughts. That is where character is built. Not on the stage. In the dark.
I think about the homies a lot in those hours.
Not in a sentimental way. Not like a motivational poster. I think about what they are carrying. The battles they do not talk about. The things they have told me in quiet moments and the things they have not. We all have our gaps. We all have those 2 AM rooms.
If I make it, they make it. If they make it, I make it. That is not a transaction. It is not “I help you so you help me back.” It is deeper than that. It is recognition. We came from the same mud. We are pulling in the same direction. Your success does not take anything from me. It proves that the thing we are all reaching for is actually reachable.
(and if you are reading this and you are one of the homies, you already know. you do not need me to say it. but I am saying it anyway.)
But how do you keep pushing when things get heavy?
I do not have a clean answer. Nobody does. The people who claim to have one are selling something. What I have is a stubbornness (something I learned from my homie). A refusal to let the mud win. Not because I am strong. Because the alternative is worse.
And when it gets lonely, when the weight presses down and there is nobody around to help carry it, I do a small thing. I pull up old photos. Highschool pictures. Those grainy, badly lit moments frozen in amber.
There is a scene in Re:Zero that I think about often. Subaru, the protagonist, gets transported to another world. He has nothing but his phone. At one point he uses it to negotiate, showing the camera to the people of that world. He tells them “this device can freeze a moment in time and keep it forever.”
(that is from Arc 1, Chapter 17 of the web novel. I looked it up. He calls the phone a “meteor” and says it “seals away a moment in time.” The scene is in the Loot House, negotiating with Felt and Rom.)
He is not wrong. That is exactly what a photograph does. It steals a moment from the flow of time and holds it still. You can look at it years later and remember not just what happened but who you were when it happened.
I look at pictures of the homies and me from years ago. I see a version of myself that existed in that moment. He was there. He experienced all of it. The laughter, the confusion, the hunger, the dreams that felt impossible and the dreams that felt too small. That version of me is gone now. But the photo keeps him alive.
Nobody else will keep that memory for you. The world moves on. People forget. Photos are the only defense against total erasure.
We are all being led toward the same inevitable death. That is not morbid. That is just the facts. The clock ticks for everyone. The mud eventually claims us all.
But while we are here, while we still have time, I want to see the homies win. I want to see them become who they are trying to become. I want to see the effort they put in when nobody was watching pay off. Not because I get a free pass from it (I do not, nobody does). Because they deserve to see what all that work was for.
Capitalism is a hell of a bitch. Time is a hell of a mistress. You can do everything right and still lose. You can work harder than anyone and still get nowhere. The system does not care about your effort.
But the homies do.
I pray for my homies’ success. Not the kind that looks good on paper. The kind that makes them sleep better at night. The kind that lets them look in the mirror and recognize the person staring back.
I pray for my homies’ success because life is one hell of a ride and I want to see them smiling at the end of it.
I pray for my homies because if they make it, the mud loses. And if the mud loses, maybe the next generation will not have to sink as deep.
I pray for my homies because that is all I can do from here. The rest is up to them. And they already know what to do.
Rest in peace to all the homies that passed, hope your doing great there and much love & success for the ones who are pushing through the mud.
