Things like spirit. Things like soul. Things like trees.

Every time I go back home to Lagos, I am confronted by the unrelenting force that is change. I see it in the way my father’s steps are a little slower, his beard a little whiter, his gait more relaxed, less agile. I see it in the faces of people I have known my whole life, my aunties aging faster than my eyes or my heart can take, my baby brother turning twenty, rendering the term ‘baby brother’ almost comedic because who is the baby here? I see it in my mother’s face, time morphing her, her beauty transforming into something finer and deeper, something that has stood the test of time. I see it in Medina Estate, new modern buildings springing up out of thin air, their tiny windows and white marble everywhere, nothing of the charm of old houses that once populated the neighborhood. Everywhere I look is evidence that nothing is the same, that nothing reminds untouched by the hand of time. But there is no where that signals the passage of time and my continual evolution as a person as clearly as my wardrobe does. Forever disorganized, always tumbling out of order, my wardrobe is a candid reflection of who I have been over the years; of all the ways I have changed and all the ways I have remained the same.

I have always had an interesting relationship with clothes. I am not the most fashionable person. Up until I turned eighteen, I did not care for clothes at all because being a fat girl is being dressed in clothes you do not like, clothes that hide your belly, hide your arms, hide you. So I never really cared for clothes. Until I went to university. Until I discovered jumpsuits. Until I discovered that my belly showing in a dress is not the end of the world. The moment that freedom found me, I began to gradually expand my taste and build a wardrobe that made me feel beautiful and unashamed of my body. One PrettyLittleThing haul at a time. But so many of the clothes I bought as a nineteen twenty year old have not stood the test of time in terms of quality, but also in terms of fidelity to self. Sometimes I’ll look at a dress I used to wear and feel such a strong sense of alienation like who is supposed to wear this one self? And that is not unfounded or a unique experience.

One of my favorite lines of poetry ever is by Rumi where he says that the alchemy of a changing life is the only truth. Our bodies change — I know how my body has ballooned and shrunken at least a dozen times since graduating from uni in 2020. Our minds change; from lawyer to writer to founder, our SPIRITS change; my fidelity to God now the center on which my life spins in a way that hasn’t always been my reality. SO many different transformations and evolutions such that it should be no surprise that clothes change and go, so what really becomes interesting to me in this time, is the clothes that stay. The clothes that have witnessed the endless transformations, the clothes that saw me through my hoe szn, saw me through breakups, saw me through relocations and now still remain in my wardrobe. Those clothes are a kind of witness, they say to me that I am capable of victories my mind could not even conceive of. That there are eternities inside the follicles of my skin and they can attest to that. I am writing today about one such dress, a tiger-print silk dress that I bought in university some time in 2019, five years ago now.

Durham is a beautiful, quaint, almost painting-like little town in the North East of England. It looks like something that was painted from the pages of an Enid Blyton book. Cobble stones. Cathedrals older than my grandmother. A slice of river that cuts through the town. There was a little stone bridge that lined the edge of the river and at the end of that bridge was a tiny TopShop store where my friend Chi and I went in and bought this tiger-print silk dress with its thin black straps and fabric that flowed over our bodies, sticking to the right things and providing just enough wiggle room for things we still wanted to hide a little. Even as I write this, that dress is a witness to my friendship with Chi, who I have not spoken to for almost two years now, even as a fondness bright as sunrise lingers in my chest. Five years later we bought that dress as law students, eager to become lawyers because we were so sure that was who we wanted to be. And now, five years later I am looking for something to wear to see my girls as a twenty-five year old writer who has long abandoned the law and is learning to build a life straddling two cities.

Since I moved to Iowa, my wardrobe in Lagos is a little sparse, so my choices are limited and finally when I have to leave home, my hand falls upon that silk tiger-print dress and I hold the body of the dress and smile. How is it possible for a few yards of fabric to house a multitude of memories? How is it that this piece of clothing has followed me across continents, seen my body bloom, watched my heart break, and mend itself back together, all the while remaining unchanged, all the while showing me a steadfastness I did not think possible. God, I have done SO many things in that dress. Lived so many lives. Embodied different versions of myself, living in different seasons of my one beautiful life. When I snuck away with my then-boyfriend to Kigali for my 20th birthday (telling nobody except my sister and a handful of my friends) , that was the dress I wore on my birthday dinner on a rooftop in Kigali overlooking the whole city, as pink and orange clouds swirled above my wide, iridescent eyes. You could not tell me anything of this brutal roller coaster we call life. The naiveté was sun bright. Whenever I look at the pictures from that time, I smile because of how precious youth is, because of how untouched a girl can be, because of how innocence mirrors the rhythm of the day, how the sun cannot be in the sky forever. It must surely set. Like that love did, its embers dying to black in the summer of 2019. And even as my heart was tattered, that dress remained whole, so whole that it held my broken body together on my very first date that summer. I can still feel the silk straps caressing the expanse of my shoulders in Eric Kayser, then Ice Cream Factory, bearing witness to both my breaking and my healing.

Now here I am, in this same Lagos that is also nothing like it used to be, and the dress falls down my body exquisitely. It’s 8pm and I’m heading to Dupe’s on the island for our sleepover and listening to The Weeknd on Third Mainland Bridge at night. I am deeply pleased by the capacity I have built all these years; how unafraid I am to do the things that once terrified me. Me, weaving through traffic on the bridge dead in the night, the same me who would cry every time she got behind the wheel. At Dupe’s there is a lot of wine, even more laughter, secrets shared and when I look around the room, my heart swells with joy because these are the women who were the girls in DH1, writing law papers at odd hours of the morning in Bill Bryson library, crying over (useless) boys, throwing up on bathroom floors, preparing for job interviews and crying when we were rejected, navigating that precocious precipice between girlhood and womanhood. And here we were, women front and center in the creation of our own destinies. Choosing our paths with fierceness and freedom. The soul of our sisterhood had not changed, it was still intact, its roots still firmly planted in the soil of love even as our bodies had changed, our careers changed, even our beliefs and principles had been pulverized by the demands of life but we remained for ourselves. The core untouched. That night, I tumbled on the floor in laughter, spoke many a heavy truth and sometime in the night, I positioned my phone and took a handful of self-timer shots and even now as I look at them, I marvel at the silk rippling across my body, at the brown hue that simmers along my skin, raiding an inner luminescence that I can’t take my eyes off. I am beautiful now, the same way I have always been. Even as my body has become so many variants of itself, the beauty remains.

And when I think about that long enough, I think of the fact that trees are always trees. You see, I am obsessed with trees more and more everyday since living in Iowa. And I observe them a lot. A tree is always a tree. Even as it goes through so many various seasons, its body changes in drastic, dramatic ways. In the summer, the trees are full and green with their leaves shimmering in the morning light. In the fall, the leaves are yellow, orange and brown and mostly fallen to the ground to be stepped on. Then in the winter, the trees are bare, no more leaves as the wind and ice settle on their naked branches. And then Spring comes and the leaves start to poke through again, their branches with sparse leaves still working their way back to fullness. But at no point in this cycle do trees stop being trees. Even when they are naked and gaunt, with no vitality of vibrant leaves, they are still trees. In the same way, I will always be myself. Regardless of what my body becomes, regardless of where I live, regardless of what I do, I will always look in the mirror and be grounded in the irrevocable permanence of my personhood. Nothing can take that from me. And so when I wear my silk dress that has followed me from city to city, from season to season, I am reminded that no matter how many things change, there are also things that remain the same, things untouched by the erosion of time, things like spirit, things like soul, things like trees that weather every storm and continue to be called what they are, and will always be.

Hello everyone! Mofiyinfoluwa here! I’m very happy to announce that this Summer, I am looking to work with people one-one-one with paid but affordable writing sessions. These will involve feedback on written work, the provision of writing prompts and general writing advice and accountability. If this sounds interesting to you or someone you know, please send inquiries to writewithfi@gmail.com! Looking forward to working with some of you!