You Can Tell A Lot About A Person By Their Shoes
I break down chunks of my life through the shoes I happen to be wearing while I experience them. For instance, I know that I was sporting black Nike’s for the entire winter of 2008 and my brain automatically shifts that section into it’s own neat, designated little place in the library of my mind. I also know that that life ended when I bought a pair of white Chuck Taylor’s the following spring and walked unprepared into a new life that I wasn’t ready to walk into. That one ended in the spring of 2010 when I bought another new pair (same color, different life). And it just goes on and on and on like that.
I’ve been doing it for a long as I can remember. I can even think back to being a young child, how getting a new pair of shoes at the end of summer always left me feeling this strange combination of excitement and sadness. Third grade ended with my New Balance tennis-shoes and fourth grade started with a pair of ugly, silver Adidas that I wore for so long the soles fell out from the underside. When a piece of life feels especially paramount, I will literally wear a pair of shoes until they are no longer functional. I imagine I do it as a defense mechanism, as a way to desperately cling to a life that I don’t want to let go of. Other times, when life feels especially heavy, I will replace a pair that is hardly worn in at all. It’s an easy way to let go of something, to look forward and ask myself the most important question of all:
Where am I going to go now?
I hadn’t owned the red Chuck Taylor’s for very long, but I lived a whole lot of life inside of them. It’s funny how that works really. You can live an entire existence in the span of three or four months and you can spend entire years that flutter by like moments. Sometimes, it can feel like both are happening simultaneously.
In a way, that’s kind of how I feel about those shoes now as I type this essay in a different pair altogether. They sit to the right of my desk, almost like they’re staring at me, like they’re jealous of the new pair and feeling completely used and discarded. How can you just walk all over me like that? They ask me, but I do not have an answer, so I don’t say anything back. I do have a strange sympathy for them laying there, though, and probably due to that, I don’t make much of an effort to move them.
Perhaps I’m just lazy. It might be both.
I bought those shoes in the early summer of 2017 after losing a single shoe of my last pair and mismatching it with the right from a previous set. It wasn’t a pretty fix, but I wasn’t about to drop seventy bucks when I had a perfectly good right shoe to fill the void in the meantime. Who the hell loses a shoe, though? Like really? To this day I have not even come close to stumbling upon that thing and I occasionally wonder where the hell it even went to begin with.
It made a lot of sense to me considering the circumstances. I had just taken a step away from a life I’d spent half a decade building upon and I was moving toward this beautiful, violent fog that didn’t yet make a damn bit of sense to me (Newsflash: it never would).
Until I made it through that door, through that fog, I reasoned, it made sense to have one new shoe and one old shoe. That’s how this particular life felt; an in-between stage with a burning desire to learn about the next and accept the last. It made sense.
I took a train ride to Pennsylvania at the tail-end of April and I remember specifically thinking that it was time to buy a new pair. The old life was over and the new one was suddenly eager to begin. May came and ended like it always does and I stumbled upon the red Chuck Taylor’s while shopping with my mother at a Kohl’s store in Quincy, Illinois. Better yet, they were severely discounted and my mom had some spare Kohl’s Cash (whatever the hell that is). I basically walked out of that store with a free pair of shoes and it was exciting to me because I got to ask the most important question yet again:
Where am I going to go now?
I knew it was only a matter of time before I discovered exactly where that was.
The beaches of North Carolina are unlike any of the other beaches that I’ve experienced. They are beaten ragged by monstrous waves and a direct sunlight that burns the bottoms of your feet if you foolishly decide to walk upon its sandy shores barefoot. There are jellyfish of all varieties, snails and slugs and birds that methodically eat at the refuse that the ocean spits out.
And that’s the first real place that the Red Chuck’s and I found ourselves.
One night in particular, I watched a storm roll in from the opposite side of the ocean. Thunder cracked and screamed while bright streaks of lightning shined upon the faces of those I was sharing my experience with. We laughed and talked about nothing and everything. We watched a lone boat sway from side to side trying to make the difficult decision to keep going to sit and wait the storm out. The wind picked up and pushed against the rolling tides, kicked up sand and spun it in a million different directions. Each grain became its own entity and some of them ended up in the creases of the red Chucks. As I type this now, that’s where the sand remains. If you look close enough, you can see it nestled in the broken webbings. You can see where they made their home and family and that’s where they will stay now for as long as they exist at all — in a box, on a table, a thousand miles away from the place it originated.
The five of us walked back to the vacation house and played board games. The shoes stayed outside and were washed by that storm and the sand stuck around inside of them despite it. I appreciated that persistence.
By August, the Red Chucks were made even more red through the blood of somebody I cherished greatly. It was a night atypical of most, at least at first. A few drinks here and there, loud music playing from my computer in the living room, and the three of us joking around about all the places we’d like to be. Mostly, it seemed, we all agreed that anywhere was probably better than the place we were presently sitting. Iowa could be so monotonous, so heavy, and it must be really nice to be on the shores of California or in the desert or in the African Savannah. Anywhere was more exciting than the flat cornfields of Iowa. Right?
The universe didn’t seem to like that conversation much and decided to spice things up a little. The girl’s foot went through a window and she sliced open an artery, bled out all over the house, and we ended up in an emergency room at the ass-crack of dawn. I was literally caked in the girl’s blood, lightheaded and scared, and she sat in excruciating pain from a tourniquet while we waited for an ambulance to take her to a better hospital. I sat with her in Iowa City for the next couple of days and lamented the reality. Turns out, there were worse places to be after all.
I got most of the blood out of my clothes, out of my house, carpet, sink, car, and linoleum. It never even occurred to me, though, to wash it off my damn shoes. The blood stayed there and continues to rest ominously as a strange reminder that everybody should probably learn to just accept whatever it is they already have. Because boring is better than tragic and something is better than nothing at all. A living room in Keokuk is better than an ER in Iowa City. So on and so forth.
Still, I do wish I could go back to that night and change the result because I view it as the catalyst to this new stage in these new shoes. I wish I could make it not happen to begin with, and if that wasn’t deemed an acceptable result by the judgers and doers of the universe, then I at least wish that it could have been my foot that went through the window. I wish it was my artery that was sliced.
But alas, that cannot be, and so the girl went home after her brush with death and she took my heart with her (even though she probably didn’t wish to own it outright). It was too late. Already hers.
All I had then was the blood on my shoes.
A few weeks later, those blood-red Chuck Taylor’s were pressed intently on a gas pedal back toward Pennsylvania. I missed her too damn much.
It was a long, grueling eleven hour trip in a car without air-conditioning and I must have hit every single stretch of traffic possible between there and here. There wasn’t a city traveled that didn’t leave me on the side of an interstate silently drowning inside myself for the time I was wasting there when I could have been closer to where I wanted to be. I tapped my foot on the floorboard, listened to NPR’s retrospective on the life and times of Hugh Hefner (three times in a row, in fact), but I eventually got there. I did it before the sun disappeared, too.
The two of us went to Pittsburgh that night and ate cheap Thai food. I wasn’t sold on the inclusion of peanuts in their recipe, but she assured me that I would regret changing the recipe at all. And so we sat there joking around and my palms were sweaty and I was needlessly nervous about it all. My feet tapped against the chair and I tangled a shoelace on the leg of my chair. She was right. The food was good.
We walked around the city a few times, got drunk at a Karaoke bar, and drove through the back-roads of Pennsylvania looking for abandoned houses. We had a few blissful, wonderfully beautiful moments and a bunch of really sour ones that I wish we could have avoided entirely. What can you do, though? You can’t change the way things go. If you could, then I don’t suppose you would ever really learn anything and we’d all be running around more stupid than we already are.
Come to think of it, that actually doesn’t really sound that bad.
That week was the end of my Red Chucks.
I don’t know what made me so eager to get a new pair, but I knew it was necessary the moment I got home from Pittsburgh. It wasn’t like I was intent on putting a close on one of life’s shoe-boxes. I can say with the utmost certainty that the exact opposite was true. I wasn’t ready to leave Pennsylvania. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the life I’d been living up until that point. As I write this even, I’m still not. I’m still trying to plot schemes and ways to breathe life into it. I’m a sucker for this life and I want it in perpetuity. I know that for sure.
I went into the store with my brother and found a pair of seafoam-colored shoes. They looked like every other pair of Chucks I’d ever owned, but they also felt strangely distinct. And it made a lot of sense after the fact, too, when I showed them to the girl in Pittsburgh and she argued:
“Those shoes are fucking blue, you idiot. They aren’t green.” I disagreed. Seemed to be par for the course at that point.
Most things change and evolve, but there are certain aspects of existence that are incapable of doing so. The two of us agreeing on a base concept? Well, that was one of those peculiar little things that just wasn’t bound to change. It wasn’t ever in the cards to begin with.
The green (or are they blue?) shoes were already a perfect manifestation of an otherwise intangible, untouchable reality. Whatever this is. Whatever that was. I write this not as a farewell to the Red Chucks or the life that I lived within them. And, paradoxically so, these new shoes don’t make me feel especially new. They didn’t have the effect that I hoped they would. It doesn’t feel like the old life has yet run its course. Part of me wonders if it ever truly will. There are some things you just have to live with despite of and that’s all there is to it.
Maybe, if I ever feel inclined, I’ll wear one red shoe and one green one. Maybe that will feel right. It worked in the past, in those old lives that I no longer live or relate to or want and as people that I no longer am. Who knows?
I don’t.
But I do have that old, lingering question and it’s more important now than it’s ever been before:
Where am I going to go now?
And, as an additional element to an already confusing white puzzle, I also wonder something else, something that is even less defined and pronounced than the question that birthed it:
Who is coming with me? Who knows?
I still don’t.
With any luck at all, maybe I’ll be wearing a pair of seafoam-green Converse Chuck Taylor’s. That’s my optimism speaking. Maybe the next road is less lonely than this one. Maybe it will soon make sense to and maybe it won’t, too. It will make for interesting experiences, though, and that’s better than nothing at all.
It has to be.
