Hi, loves. 🌿
On purchases that linger
My preteen has become obsessed with a particular pair of my shoes. I bought them 15 years ago, on a trip from Paris to Amsterdam to visit my dear friend, Riley. I’d been living in Paris for the summer to heal my back. Perhaps six weeks into the insanity — this is truly the only word I have for it, because it involved being yelled at by an old French woman about the position of my pelvis and spine — I got on a train to drink some wine and eat some chocolate with an old friend. I needed to stop thinking exclusively about my posture.
I was 31. The summer, while full of croissants and fresh baguettes and a lot of duck pâté, had not been much fun. I was saddled with chronic sciatica, which, even after lumbar surgery, had shrunk my life to the size of a pea. I was living with my Godfather, who was wonderful but also 30 years older than me. I was lonely and isolated and had no idea if this possibly unhinged leap of faith would come to anything. I was quite sure — as were most people in my life — that I’d lost my mind.
But a few weeks in, relief appeared in tiny pockets: my body would turn silent for hours at a time, a feeling I hadn’t experienced in many, many years. This might end, I thought. After five long years, this might, it just might.
In Amsterdam, I bought the shoes because my back teacher thought heels were best for one’s posture (whether this is true or not is, of course, very much up for debate, but according to her, it encouraged the proper anterior rotation of the pelvis). What can I say? I was becoming a convert — she was the first person to grant me even a smidge of relief so I’d do whatever she said.
Riley took me to a tiny little Dutch shoe store and I fell in love with a pair of Chie Miharas: wood heel, beige leather, wide cuts along the sides. Because of their “comfort” they were even considered good for your feet? They were higher than anything I could imagine myself wearing (at least two inches, if not more), but what did I know of who I was about to become? Everything — everything — was about to change.
I proudly brought them back to Paris, then back to Brooklyn. I took them with me when I moved to Harlem, then back to Brooklyn, to Munich, then Vienna and then all the way to Los Angeles. I’ve held onto them for 15 years — and I have never once worn them.
My body experienced what I can only call a miracle in Paris — I learned to sit and stand properly, which eventually dialled down the sciatica — but still, whenever I put on the shoes, the heels were, as I’d known all along, simply too high. They scared me. I tried them on in various apartments, felt a twinge in my nerve, and immediately took them off. It wasn’t worth the risk; I was still fragile — sturdier, but not up for this kind of whimsy. But I somehow never got rid of them. I once offered them to my sister, then rescinded the offer in a kind of panic (but maybe one day!). I’ve thought about selling them, but haven’t.
For years, I forgot that they existed — until my daughter pulled them off a high shelf and started making a habit of tromping around in them (I’m sure our downstairs neighbors love us). Every time they reappear, I am filled with a kind of wonder for the young woman who decided to throw down 200€ on a pair of heels that were entirely impractical for her life in New York and that, even if she wasn’t walking everywhere, or forever hopping on or off the F train, couldn’t be guaranteed she’d ever wear.
Now they feel like a testament to my dogged belief, at 31, that my body was finally healing, and that, after that summer in Paris, I’d somehow become someone else — someone who lived in a body that could weather those kinds of heels effortlessly. Who could afford this kind of beauty. Who could do whatever the fuck she wanted, finally.
What I didn’t know back then was that the body doesn’t heal in one fell swoop. Maybe it never really does, it simply gets rearranged and rearranged again. It accommodates, it gets stronger, then something else falls apart. It feels better, if you treat it well, with New Balance sneakers and orthopedic sandals. It develops different needs. But it doesn’t ever go back to what, in those days of still being so very young and naïve and entranced with the possibilities of a pain-free life, of a life in which I might fall in love and maybe have a baby or two and actually start living again — I didn’t get that it doesn’t go back to what it once was. It doesn’t go back to its youth. It simply moves forward, full of cracks.
When I look at that photo of me drinking rosé in Riley’s entryway, I remember how I felt, other than perfectly drunk: beautiful, filled with lightness — things that had seemed to escape me for so long during that time. I was a person who had access to (here it is again, that word!) whimsy. I could buy something for a future, because I could finally imagine one.
Does it matter that I was wrong about the shoes? Of course not. I still look at them as a symbol of a time in which the world felt like it was rotating on its axis, when I was finally turning toward the light of the sun, ready to take my first steps.
Sending love,
Abs ox
✨ SUMMER SCHOOL UPDATE! My dear friend Kathleen and I are scheming away on an updated Summer School program (think LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!). Early bird updates here. I cannot wait to write with you all summer lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
Love it. Same. I bought a beautiful pair of leather made sandals with a small heal maybe 15 years ago in Colombia. They are beautiful.
I had a pair of steel toe silver boots I bought in Paris when I was 18. I kept them through my 20s but moving between small spaces eventually made me get rid of them, but I often wish I had them still. My kids would LOVE them. And the list of shoes I cannot wear---foot, hip, etc---is so long. At least orthopedic shoes are in right now, right?