Speaking to Her

I've been observing you for five months now. Even though we come from very different backgrounds, I feel that I've gotten to know most of you. Yet I'm not entirely sure if that's fair to say.

Choosing you from an extensive list of villages and towns to examine felt hasty. You were distant and foreign. Each journey through your meandering roads was a labyrinthine struggle, as if mental barriers had been erected between us. A friend casually mentioned plans to intervene in your delicate fabric through a development project near your humble Church. Even then, it became clear that my choice was driven by something deeper, something that intertwined my thoughts of you with a sense of purpose beyond coincidence.

Given my limited time to study your qualities, I see your small size as a feat — I can walk through you and experience you firsthand in a few hours. Yet after our brief encounters, I left under the pretence of analysing you further from a distance, through an array of coloured pixels on a monitor.

I studied you closely in the following months, scanning your surface from aerial photographs, mapping your street imprints, and highlighting your erratic new developments. Not knowing how else to analyse you, I modelled your curves and heights, preserved your image and showcased your beauty to others who had yet to experience it. The blade cutting through sheets of wood became your streets; hot-wire slicing foam formed your buildings. Small pieces of timber, meticulously glued together, traced the curves of your Church Cupola. I then created idealised images of you, drawing inspiration from your past and digitally modelling your speculative future.

Frustrated and unsure of what to do with this newfound understanding, I spoke of you to gather opinions, to help form my own. I researched your history to justify your future, and listened to people's perspectives in the hope of finding yours. Amidst this confusion, I refused to visit you when I returned to the island.

The distance I grew accustomed to provided a certain comfort, and confronting you in person with my new proposals could have been a revelation that dismissed my work entirely.

Do I do this out of care?

Yesterday, I forced myself to visit you. I parked by the first line of terraced houses that mark your boundary and walked in. Immediately, I was captivated once again by the beauty you portrayed. With a sense of anticipation, I reached for my phone, but stopped myself. Instead, I sat at the edges of open spaces and ends of streets. I wrote about you to try to capture the qualities that make up your fragile ecosystem — an ecosystem always under threat from unsettling images of development.

I am still figuring out how to move forward with you in this next phase. Obliged academically to speculate on specific ways to enhance and retain your beauty in times of oppressive change, I find myself at a loss. Tasked with the impossible, I try to listen carefully to what you wish, reading between the lines to hear your voice, a voice I fear has been lost. A voice silenced under the words of Policy, Article Numbers, Planning Control procedures and other political masking.

As I walked through you today, one thing became apparent. I do know you. The forty-minute walk back to my car confirmed this as we engaged in a dialogue that revealed to me how I have unconsciously come to love you.

This revelation resonated strongly at three points.

The first instance occurred when I grew frustrated that I couldn't find a particular area of land that was politically earmarked for greening, only to be led to it moments later.

The second was a quiet joy: an older townhouse by the Church bore the nameplate "Lenmar." While this might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with you, "Lenmar" carries meaning for me. The name combines "Leonard" and "Maria," presumably representing two lovers. Its modest black-painted marble aroused qualities of pride and tenderness. I imagined the love and care Leonard and Maria poured into this house and, by extension, into you.

The last occurrence shocked me. As I passed your Church, I came across a new façade — a project I had worked on during my first internship four years ago. I had never visited the site then, but the memory of those aligned travertine slits returned with unease.

Reflecting on this, I can't help but feel our paths crossed with intention. These encounters led me to believe that meeting you was no mere coincidence.