WORDS

Object Impermanence

    Huddled on the floor and wriggling into my boots, I notice the crinkled grooves in the leather skin have worn so deep, tears have formed. They are the first ones, but by their condition, the next are not long to follow. I release a long sigh and remember how I find it extremely difficult to part with shoes. I tend to grind each pair down to their skeleton and mold them to the dips and arches of mine, until they are carved for and from me.

    Through about six weeks of initial wear and tear after my twentieth birthday, the fabric shredded brutally into my feet. Although now we have not spoken in two years, I can still hear the mocking laughter of a friend on my first outing with them. I had to crawl around Andersonville, as the shape of my feet was becoming permanently hardened and altered for the more grotesque underneath a canopy of orange leaves. The sound of the train periodically crashed through the air as it arrived and departed from Argyle. It was a fall day before my junior year of college had entered its fullest bloom, its ripest season.

    Months later, after the world shut down on account of Covid-19 and the only place we could go was the grocery store, I used to cherish my trips to an already beloved international mart on the corner. Twice a week, I would tuck my quilted gray sweats into the boots, my dad’s gray hoodie into my reflective puffer coat, and finally my head into my gigantic scarf to go and buy my grocery haul. My cart typically consisted of a variety of vegetarian experiments, oreos, hummus, and three to four bottles of sauvignon blanc. Bad British accents would echo around our duplex as we drunkenly watched reality TV, giving up on any semblance of pretending things were okay.

    When I moved out of that home and cleaned out two years of happy cohabitation and an excess of solitude, I brought the boots with me to my first apartment that I lived alone in. I remember the sound of rubber soles sticking solidly against the wood floor of my empty sublet. There were four empty and echoing bedrooms, a barren kitchen, a sunroom littered with my art supplies, and my room. There, the candle musk from earlier in the day would linger amongst my sporadic trinkets and bobbles - found miniature vases from New Orleans filled with dried flowers, lacquered wooden pieces covered in paintings of patron saints, and my grandmother’s metallic keychain tchotchkes. I would come home, take the three flights of tight stairs, and walk to the side of my twin sized mattress. It was laid helplessly on the floor and covered in a queen-sized, crushed velvet comforter that spilled all over the ground. My bed frame had been a write off in the move, but I quite enjoyed my proximity to the ground. Though I was floating aimlessly, it made me feel sturdy. I used to peel off my shoes and lay down, staring at a blank ceiling in the thick, hot room. My mind would bounce around images of different passing love infatuations and sweet nothings heard from this mattress. Those days, they came in many shifting shapes and frequencies, all of which were blissfully impermanent. I could think of the sight of four beautiful girls comfortable on the beach, curly hair windswept as we would share charcuterie and chat about the things we loved and hated. I hoped that I could feel this normal at the end of the year, when I would move again and everything would be different. At the end of the day, I might fill myself with live jazz music sitting in the art museum garden, drinking wine with two of the most authentic people I have ever cared for, and cherishing the way that my life was sprinkled with such beautiful flowers. This sachet of time was precious as it happened and has become a refuge when things do not feel right. It is a reminder that though things change, sometimes too quickly to keep up, there is always time to look around. 

    Like a hug, the boots have held onto me through months where there wasn’t anybody but me; only new sights and feelings. They’ve been cast atop steel pegs as a motorbike passenger, squeaking and grating against the laminate floors of the first school I have ever taught at, and lugged completely separate from my backpack when traveling between provinces. I laced them up the first time I saw a jellyfish in a crumpled pile alongside the beach and after the first time I thought to myself that perhaps I was in love. I laced them up to eat meats I have never seen and be observed as a foreign object and when I took my first unmitigated steps around Bangkok. They were there for all of the loneliness, holding me. Reminding me that once, someplace in time, I had a place.

    At this moment, observing the disintegration and wear, I am able to briefly see the boots not as a loved one, but as ragged objects. I realize time has passed, and how much time has passed. I’m not nineteen but staring twenty three in the face, living on a continent I had not ever planned to visit. It isn’t just mileage but twelve hours of daylight that separates me from any love I’ve ever learned about for the entirety of my life, and it feels like the only thing that could understand how I feel is these boots. They bear witness to my life, the smallest pieces, and not just this life I have in the current moment. If they’re not here to recall for me where we have been together, perhaps I will simply forget; another casualty to the rolling of time.

    At some point, when the shoes are just leather and the laces become unwound thread, and when I am not there to attest to the significance of the steps these shoes took, they won’t matter. And my whole life will be made of things nobody can remember or care about, and nothing will be different than it ever was. So I finish putting the boots on, and I tell myself that I will throw them away another day.