The Photo I Almost Wasn't In

The tackle I still feel

There is a small chip on the corner of my left front tooth, and I know its exact shape the way you know the ceiling above your childhood bed. It happened on a Wednesday night at an artificial turf pitch off Rivonia Road, one of those five-a-side courts lit up like a fish tank while the rest of Sandton went home for supper. I was thirty then, or close to it, playing in a league that meant nothing to anyone except the eight of us who took it far too seriously. A guy called Tebogo went in for a fifty-fifty ball, I went in a fraction later, and somewhere in the collision my own knee came up and caught me. My tooth met bone. I heard it more than I felt it, a dry little tick, and then the taste of a two-rand coin flooded my mouth.

I remember laughing it off. That is the part I think about most. I spat, I checked with my tongue, I found the rough new edge where smooth enamel used to be, and I said something like, ag, it's fine, let's carry on. We carried on. We lost. I drove home along the M1 with the radio too loud and my tongue worrying that corner over and over, and I told myself I would sort it out on Monday.

I did not sort it out on Monday. I did not sort it out for six years.

The quiet thing I started doing

Here is the strange part. The chip is small. If you saw my face right now you would probably not notice it unless I pointed at it, and even then you might squint and say you couldn't really see what I meant. But I noticed it. I noticed it every single time I passed a mirror, every time my phone camera flipped to selfie mode and ambushed me with my own face, every time a waiter handed me a metal-backed menu that threw my reflection back at me in a bar in Rosebank.

And slowly, without ever deciding to, I stopped smiling with my teeth.

It is a small adjustment. You press your lips together and you lift the corners and you let your eyes do a bit of the work, and to most people it reads as a normal, if slightly reserved, smile. In photographs it looks fine. That was the whole point. I became very good at the closed-mouth smile the way some people become good at a golf swing, through thousands of quiet repetitions until the body just does it. Group photos at braais, my cousin's twenty-first, the office year-end at a place in Sandton City with fairy lights strung across the ceiling. Lips together. Chin slightly down. Done.

The hand thing came later and I am more embarrassed about that one. In meetings, when I had to speak for any length of time, I developed this habit of resting two fingers near the side of my mouth, elbow on the table, as if I were deep in thought. I was not deep in thought. I was hiding a tooth. I did it in client presentations. I did it on video calls, angling myself so the light fell a certain way. My manager once told me I looked very considered in meetings and I nearly laughed out loud, because what she was reading as gravitas was just a man ashamed of a chipped tooth trying not to show it.

I never told anyone. That is the thing about a small vanity. It feels too silly to say out loud. If I had lost the whole tooth, if I had a gap, people would have understood. But to admit that a chip the width of a grain of rice had quietly rearranged how I moved through the world, how I stood in photos, how I spoke in rooms, felt pathetic. So I said nothing, and the silence made it bigger, the way silence always does.

The phone call from my sister

My sister Lindiwe is four years younger than me and has never once in her life been afraid of a camera. Where I go quiet, she gets louder. She phoned me on a Sunday afternoon in autumn, when the Highveld light goes that thin gold colour and the jacarandas along the side streets have long dropped their purple. I was on my balcony in Bryanston with a lukewarm coffee.

"I need you to do the speech," she said. No hello. No warm-up. That is Lindiwe. "At the wedding. You're my big brother. It has to be you."

The wedding was booked for a venue near Sandton, one of those places with a long lawn and a marquee and a photographer whose whole job is to catch the moment nobody is posing for. I said yes immediately, because of course I said yes. And then I put the phone down and sat with a feeling in my chest that took me a while to name.

It was not stage fright. I have spoken in front of rooms for work plenty of times, fingers near my mouth and all. It was the photographs. It was the certain, unavoidable knowledge that on the most important day of my sister's life, I would be standing at the front of a room, mouth open, mid-sentence, and a professional would be photographing every second of it. There would be no chin-down closed-mouth trick that could survive an afternoon of that. And these were not photos that would live and die on a phone. These were the ones that go in a frame on a wall. These were the ones Lindiwe would look at when she was seventy.

I sat there and I thought, with a clarity that almost frightened me, that I could not do this for the rest of my life. I could not dread every camera and every podium until I died. I was thirty-six. If I kept this up, I was signing myself up for maybe fifty more years of fingers-near-the-mouth, of lips pressed shut, of being the slightly closed-off looking one in every photo of every celebration. Fifty years. Over a chip.

Actually picking up the phone

It took me a week to do anything, which by my standards was lightning fast. My colleague Farhaan mentioned in passing that his wife had finally sorted out a crown after years of putting it off, and I heard myself ask, far too casually, who she had seen. He named a practice not far from the office. That night I did the thing I had avoided for six years. I typed "chipped front tooth" into the search bar, and then, because a small stubborn part of me wanted to be near where I already knew my way around, I added Sandton. I found myself reading through a page for a Sandton dentist and, almost against my will, filling in the little contact form before I could talk myself out of it.

I want to be honest about how strange that felt. Booking it was harder than the tackle ever was. The tackle happened to me. This I had to choose, and choosing meant admitting the whole embarrassing truth, that a grown man had reorganised his face around a flaw nobody else could see.

The consultation, and the thing I did not expect

I almost cancelled twice. I did not. On the morning of the appointment I sat in a waiting room with a water feature trickling in the corner and a stack of interior magazines, and I rehearsed how I would explain it without sounding ridiculous. When I finally sat in the chair and the dentist asked what had brought me in, all my rehearsed casualness fell away and I just said it plainly. Six years. A football tackle. I stopped smiling. I have a speech to give.

She listened without a flicker of the pity I had braced for. She looked at the tooth, asked me to smile properly, which I had not done in front of a stranger in a very long time, and then she did the thing that undid me a little. She handed me a mirror and showed me the chip up close, and she talked about it not as a catastrophe but as a small, ordinary, completely fixable thing. The way she described what a Cosmetic Dentist actually does day to day made it sound less like surgery and more like someone patiently restoring a corner of a picture frame. I will spare you the technical parts, partly because I barely understood them and partly because they were never really the point. The point was the feeling of sitting there and realising the mountain I had built in my head was, to someone who did this every day, a small hill.

I asked her, feeling foolish, whether people really came in for something this minor. She said something I have thought about many times since. She said the small things are often the ones people carry the longest, precisely because they feel too small to mention. That a chipped tooth, or a mark, or a crookedness, can quietly run a person's confidence for years while they tell themselves it is nothing. Finding a good Dentist in Sandton turned out to be the easy part. The hard part had been all those years of deciding I did not deserve to fix something so trivial.

The speech

I gave the speech. The tooth was sorted well before the wedding, and I would love to tell you that the fix itself was the emotional climax, but it was not. The climax came at the marquee near Sandton, on that long green lawn, when I stood up with my notes shaking slightly in my hand and I looked at my sister in her dress and I forgot, for the first time in six years, to think about my mouth at all.

I did not rest my fingers near my face. I did not press my lips together. I told the room the story about Lindiwe at eight years old refusing to be scared of anything, and I laughed, openly, teeth and all, and the photographer caught it. I have the photo now. It is on a shelf in my flat in Bryanston. My mouth is wide open, mid-laugh, mid-word, and I look like a man who is completely, unguardedly happy, which I was.

For years I thought the chip had taken something from me. It had, but not the tooth. It had taken the open version of my own face, the one that laughs before it remembers to be careful. I did not get that back in a dentist's chair. I got it back at a podium, looking at my sister, finally too full of one feeling to have room for the old small one.