What is the beauty of a place — the objective reality of what it is, or how it makes us feel?
There were pathways I walked with my brother. I think of them now and they do not feel the same. Not because the roads have been redrawn — though some have, but because he is gone now, japa’d, in search of something greener. And the peculiar thing about landscape is that it does not wait. The moment the people who gave a place its meaning begin to leave, or the circumstances that define a place change, the place begins its own quiet transformation — not necessarily in its soil, but in how it is received by anyone who remains to witness it.
I have come to believe there is an emotional dialogue between people and the land they inhabit. A conversation carried on not in words but in the impressions — physical, social, architectural — that communities make on their environment, and that the environment, in turn, makes on them. We shape the land and the land shapes us back. What we call landscape is never just terrain. It is a layered record: of who walked here, who left, who stayed, what was built and what was abandoned and what quietly grew through the cracks.
There were fields I played in as a child. Green, I think, though I am no longer sure if I am remembering the fields or remembering the feeling of being in them. They are not brown in my mind now, or necessarily abandoned. But they are something else. Something I do not have an exact word for. The green of those fields was partly the green of friendship, of careless running, of laughter that had no particular object. We are grown now and living through Nigeria as it is, uncertainty and all, and somewhere in growing up and facing that, I think I changed the colour of those fields in my own memory without realising it.
This is what transition does. It does not announce itself. It happens at the level of perception, quietly, until one day you return to a place you thought you knew and discover that knowing is not quite the same as remembering. The country I grew up in and the country I am living in now share a name and a geography but between them something has shifted — in the economy, in the politics and the texture of daily life, in the faces on the road, in the number of those faces that are no longer there. Every absence changes the arithmetic of what remains.
The land absorbs all of it: Every version of this place that has ever existed, every road cut through it, every road reclaimed by grass, every structure built in hope and the ones that weren’t finished. It absorbs this present moment too, without opinion, with a patience that has no interest in our timelines.
I’ve been travelling a lot these days and I keep finding myself in situations that bring me back to this question. What is the beauty of a place— the objective reality of what it is, or how it makes us feel?
And underneath that: when we move so far from the lands we once knew, do those lands remember us? Do the fields recall the specific weight of how we ran through them? Do they hold, in their soil, some trace of what we felt and did not say? would they remember us even as we forget them?
I keep thinking about the fields. What they look like now. What colour they have become in the part of me that holds them. What the passage of my own life has done to them, without asking my permission. I think you have fields too. Roads you walked with someone who is no longer where they were. Places that were one thing when you were inside them and are something else now — not because they changed, or not only because they changed, but because you did. You took your share of their meaning with you when you left. You left behind your share of theirs.
I wonder what colour those places are in you now. I wonder what phase they are in — whether they are mid-erosion or quietly rebuilding, whether they are still waiting or whether they have already become something that no longer needs you to complete it.
I wonder if you know.