Does the Shoe Fit?
Or has the other just dropped.
St. Agnes is the patron saint of girls. On the 21st of January lambs are blessed on her altar and their wool is used in the robes of archbishops. On the eve, a girl is to fast in preparation for divination. There are a few different methods which have been recorded for how to bring on a dream of your future husband on her name day, but the one I tried involves taking sprigs of rosemary and thyme and sprinkling them with urine (I did this in the shower, because I am considerate and have poor aim) then you put the herbs in the shoes respectively. The shoes are placed on either side of your headboard, and you say a rhyming couplet to the saint herself begging to ease your troubles as you fall off to sleep. In the dream I was standing in a downpour with a man I used to sleep with. He was wearing a new pair of running shoes and smiled down at me condescendingly before breaking into a full sprint. I could not follow him, because I was barefoot.
It was opening night and I was wearing a vintage pair of boy’s brogues, this is how my first relationship began. The rubber soles peeled off while I was leading people to their seats. The general manager tried to use epoxy to fix them, but it did not last. Going back to my place would take two hours round trip. I knew of one person who lived nearby. He’d asked me for notes in our class, I figured asking his shoe size a fair trade. My manager told me he could order whatever he wanted if he came through with an acceptable pair. I looked like a clown for the rest of the evening, but he stuck around and read James Baldwin at the bar. I kept the broken shoes. Another workday further down the line began warm, and I wore a pair of velvet loafers. I did not check the weather when I was younger, I had this expectation that things would just work out for me despite decisions to the contrary.
It was late and the snow had piled on thick, the first of the season. The manager gave me billowing plastic bags to tie around my shoes, but the trip back to my own apartment felt more impossible than usual. By this time, I was staying over often because his place was more convenient, is what I told myself. I made my way over before even asking. He told me no, but I insisted. I was outside his apartment when he asked if I could just wait a couple hours. I got the text looking through the big picture window at his ex-girlfriend in the living room. I sent back a photo from outside and shuffled back to the train station in a daze. The train was delayed, and he begged me to come back. I crumpled into a ball on his doorstep, completely overexposed. He carried me, shivering uncontrollably, into the shower, I did not stop crying for hours. He said,
“No one has ever gotten this upset over me,”
as though he was impressed. I mistake feeling weak for being in love. I held onto him throughout increasingly brutal attempts to leave, the same way I could not bring myself to get rid of the broken shoes. He refused to celebrate an anniversary with me, but I gave him one of the shoes as a gift after a particularly long separation. I framed it with baby’s breath, sole detached from the body and resting by its side. The gift made him uncomfortable. When I moved in, I asked him what he’d done with the shoe, and he told me his roommate, a painter, had thrown it out. It was hard to believe he hadn’t done it himself. I carried my shoe into two different apartments before finally doing the same, years later long after he already lived with someone new. I had put a letter he’d written to me in the back and forgotten it was still inside. I thought killing the sentimental part of myself would feel liberating, but there’s just less of me now.
He slept with my roommate immediately after she moved in, I only found out a year later when he would meet me for sex before his therapy appointments. To be fair I’d also slept with his roommate, but while I was forthcoming when I told him, he neglected to admit he’d already done the same and came down harshly on me instead. Unknowingly I would talk to my roommate about him, ask for advice. I insinuated in the way you do when you already know something and are afraid to voice it fully that they would be good together. She told me he was a bad person with her back turned to me in the kitchen. She focused only on perfections. We agreed that the way a person did one thing was the way they did everything. I try not to think about how someone who loves perfect things didn’t consider me. I extrapolate this to shoes, and more broadly to the way people treat people. I had thought better than to write on so base a topic, but I had to turn Jeanne Dielman off after I watched her polishing her son’s pair alone in her kitchen. This, of all things in the movie, is what disturbed me most. Devotion to something that refuses to love you back but nevertheless, is alluring.1 Fuck, sometimes all a shoe can do is hurt.
The way I treat my shoes says more than I’m ready to accept. Back when people measured your feet for you in the stores a man told me I had the flattest he’d ever seen. My mother laughed. I think this gave me a complex. It felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me because I would never dance ballet. To this day, I don’t spend much money on shoes, usually they are bought secondhand or given as a gift. I don’t go out of my way, and I certainly don’t shop for them online. I think my feet are not worth much conscious effort. But when I find a pair of shoes I like, I wear them every day until they fall off my feet. I wear them into the ground. I treat people like this too; I know I do.
The man who let me borrow his shoes was from a southern climate. Our professor, a writer of some esteem, offered to buy him winter shoes as the seasons changed and he noticed him showing up to class in wet sneakers. The man who let me borrow his shoes was good at getting things out of people. He was a director, after all. He wore out his shoes like I did mine and chose them for impractical, sentimental reasons and I thought this meant something about our compatibility. He was hyperaware of the way his feet smelled and was constantly dusting them with deodorizing powder. To me this meant he had a lot of secrets and wanted to feel in control of things that were out of it. He would suggest I dust mine, too.
The man I dreamt of had a thing about black leather shoes. He would fantasize about a very expensive pair that he never permitted himself to buy. With every paycheck, he would buy comparable ones which were also pricey, but to a lesser degree. The shoes would come, and he would find something wrong with them, become guilty over the purchase, and ditch the pair in an alley somewhere thinking someone less fortunate would come across them. On Christmas, I bought him a pair of expensive house shoes, the kind that signal wealth in a way I knew he would like. I bought them to match a silk robe. Despite this, he made a point of returning them to the store to pick out a new pair for himself, negligibly different. He convinced the shopkeeper to take them back even though they had already been worn. Daring me to take it as a slight.
On a lighter note, my prom date gave me a pair of blue puma roller-skates that he thought were size 8 men’s but were really women’s. I was too afraid to kiss him because he made Vines2 about the car he lifted, and tattooed “yolo” on his own ass. I don’t wear them often because they are impractical and I have been injurious to others with them on, but he has a successful skate brand now. I wish I could keep more people in my head like I keep his pumas in my closet. A tattoo artist complimented me on a classic, wheelless pair of sambas I wore religiously because he had a thing for feet. He had ruined his soccer career tearing his Achilles tendon. He gave me a tattoo of a naked woman in fetish boots taming a snake and then asked me to do foot stuff in bed. I giggled throughout and he never asked me out again, but I would bump into him outside the shoe store he worked at. When it gets too close to the real thing, it all unravels, and I don’t have a thing for feet, just the intimacy they point toward.
There was a day with the man in my St Agnes’ dream when another vintage pair hurt me so badly, I decided to ditch them in the park. I walked through the streets barefoot, going into vintage shops looking for a pair that suited me. I asked him what he thought of the shoes I tried on, but he could give me no clear answer, and nothing was good enough for me. I ended up staying barefoot the whole afternoon. I went into galleries and bars because with the right person with you, you might not even need shoes. No one is going to walk up to you and tell you you’re doing the wrong thing unless that’s their job and you’ve seriously gone too far, and then you go somewhere where you aren’t required to wear them, and they give you special socks instead.
In the mental hospital there was this book of shoes. There was an obvious hierarchy. You could fill in the rest of the person from the ground up. I left it out for the other patients because I started to believe that was the distinction between Us and Them. Presentation. You could work your way up to discovering yourself via shoes. I went to Winners3 and got a pair of false leather kitten heels that looked a lot more expensive than they were. I wore them around the ward. The patients thought I was a doctor. I tried to get the head psychiatrist to fall in love with me for fun and entertainment. I think I got close.
Spoiler alert: She kills a man.
Proto TikTok
This Canadian store is like a more carceral Homegoods and I was super paranoid at the time and only had a few hours to be outside a day, so it felt like a high achievement.