On the life of shoes

These are my shoes. Today, perhaps after the fact of writing a Shakespeare paper into the dawn of the early morning, to the point that the chemical balance in my brain had fallen out of equilibrium, I got eerily close to deciding to wash my sneakers. Keds commandments tell me no, my Mom tells me yes, and my mind is ambivalent. Cleanliness isn’t my concern; I recall feeling irrationally yet utterly self conscious the first month — having them blaringly untarnished and the whites of them leering at me. Once immaculately and uniformly black, replete with a sense of emptiness, their eclectic earthly smears are now landing it somewhere between dinge and dank. It’d be washing away everything. The shoes have lifted and carried me everywhere in the past eleven months; the past eleven months when life has been jolted with a resemblance of a life well lived.

I never even meant to buy them; the kind sir I contacted about the job let me know I had been hired and I was to report to work the following morning. I needed black shoes. It was ten o’clock in the evening. I went to the virtually non-existent clothing department in the 24-hour grocery store.

My Keds were laced up pretty tightly the first weeks; it saw ten-hour shifts of a dozen happy unions – wedding cake being the first foreign contaminant it was acquainted with. The precariously tipped over wine glass in the bride’s hand as she danced with her betrothed dribbled champagne into the litter of petals on the wood floor and on to my shoes. These sneakers greeted my first room-mate, saw me through late nights of academic pursuits, escorted me to the nearest coffee vendor, ushered me to house parties, and waded me through streams of cheap beer leaked from kegs. They sat beneath me against the dewy grass during sunrise and while I read string theory on the hill; they forgave me when, during a lapse of poor judgment, I had opted for trying a new short-cut and had sunk them in an alarmingly viscous and inconspicuous pool of mud. They’ve run through rain puddles dashing water in cinematic glory; the only emission of sound save for the rainfall was the splashing of these sneakers against the concrete, each decibel cutting into the late-night as thunderous as each vein of lightning that shredded the sky. We stood at very front of the concerts we’d go to and they’d support the tips of my toes while deafening music pulsed through its fibers, sweat waxed to the floor. They’ve ran with me through the subway system in New York City, hopping over incompliant gates in disgusting weather. They kept their modest dignity when met with the loafers of urban bourgeois. We strode around cities. We spun the sky. On summer days, they flirted with the pavement but settled on the grass; even in times of mundanity, they’d comply with my desultory, absentminded ankle-flexing under tables. There’s something satisfying seeing their soles worn thin, knowing it’s partly due to getting lost in the most enriched and fascinating realms of ideas and potential enlightenment — glorious libraries and science museums. They’ve walked my head into a place I didn’t mind being and they’ve helped me wander my mind to living on my own in Ann Arbor.

We’ve stomped out potential forest fires and we’ve discovered glorious fields through muddy passageways. Each splatter of mud means something; every moment is a spot of dirt, collectively creating an idiosyncratic batch of eccentricities. I remember how they maneuvered me around the puddles and I remember emerging from a narrow path to the field and letting them rest on the table, to get off the ground for a bit.

We’ll be together, sockless and laces loose, to sit through exams next week. And we’ll be together finding our way back to couches inlaid in forests. We’ll be together until we can’t be together anymore.

The shoes seem mistakenly too emphasized for a single size eight Keds, but they’re hauntingly not. I ended up hand washing them tonight, and with each layer removed, I made room for another one.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.