West Trade Review: "A Meditation on Shoes" by Sofia Rabaté

Sofia Rabaté

A Meditation on Shoes

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Image by Wellington Cunha from Pexels

Sofia M. Rabaté is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and later earned her MFA from Temple University, where she was the editor of TINGE Magazine.

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Delia was laughing, pointing a thin finger at me. The problem was that I had walked into the office barefoot. I tried to explain what had happened, like it was something that could be calculated on a spreadsheet. How does anyone, she was choking on the words, lose their shoes on the subway?

At least it made Delia laugh when I was sure she would never talk to me again. I was afraid when I saw that Delia would be the first one to see me shuffle into the office barefoot. My flesh was sticking to the linoleum. You could see my chipped pedicure from two months ago and the hair on my toes. My feet were dirty.

When they were still my shoes, they were rubbing a raw band around my feet as I sat on the subway. I remember thinking that leather can be both soft and sharp. I thought I could slip out of them for a moment while I let the train’s roar numb my ears. I ground my feet into the thick dark filth, not thinking about work, or about the way I ruined everything with Delia.

It was like that nightmare where you realize you left your home naked. I noticed I was barefoot the second the subway doors closed, feeling the ridged yellow plastic under my feet, my mouth dropping into a little o. The train left the station with a tremendous roar, leaving me behind, my shoes still tucked underneath the seat.

After I got off the train that morning, someone must have taken my spot. I can imagine the curiosity and disgust of that person who, surrendering to the hard orange plastic, found a pair of size seven and a half heels sleeping under the seat.

If I have any luck, the heels were found by a person who wears a seven and a half, or even a seven, since the extra half-size gives you some room when your feet swell on hot days. It could have been someone who needed a new pair and didn’t mind that other feet had been in them. And why not? Before I went on my health journey, I once ate an abandoned tray of fries at a bar.

I hope that they weren’t found by someone who threw them in the trash, where they’re crying like abandoned kittens. Some days I think about landfills and I want to jump into the ocean.

At work, I could have asked Delia for help. She solved many of my problems before, offering me a tampon or a dollar bill, but that morning there was nothing left to do. She wouldn’t have shared her shoes even if she could. I know there are limits. I’m a reasonable person.

I cut out slippers from printer paper, closing the seams with a stapler. I swished when I walked. Disposable shoes, Delia said, that’s great for the environment. The paper slippers did not protect me from the various sharp things on the ground. The problem with life is that you are often vulnerable, like a soft-shell crab.

Work was fine, except for the fact that I stared at my feet the whole time. I’m developing a round back from poor posture, which I know will one day become permanent. It was a good day. We showed a donor where we would put his name on the wall in big metal letters, and I got the spreadsheet I needed. I sent seven emails and used nineteen exclamation marks. I turned the most diabolical messages into soft, ingratiating requests.

On my way out of the office, I did another meditation on my phone. I only have a few meditations left before my free trial runs out. I need to ration them now. A few days ago, I wasted an entire meditation thinking about a label I had misread in my bathroom. Instead of satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, I read suffocation guaranteed in terrible red letters.

The meditation app features the voice of Marianna Cloud. Cloud is her stage name. She played the best friend in three sitcoms I watched as a teen. I don’t remember the plots, but I can picture the Candy Land sets, the bovine expressions. Now Marianna runs the meditation app. Overcome by childhood memories, I promptly downloaded it after seeing an ad for it on my phone. When the free trial finishes, it will ask me for $49.99 a month and I will cancel.

What are you listening to? Delia asked. She was walking fast through the lobby to catch up with me. Her tone seemed friendly, but I know when people only want to talk to me out of pity. Music, I said quickly. I wanted to keep Marianna for myself.

Do you want to live in a world where lobsters, who feel pain, are boiled alive? Marianna asks. No, I want to live in a different world. But Marianna offers no solutions.

It was hard to go home after work because I’m dealing with a house centipede infestation. Jim the pest control guy tells me that house centipedes are helpful since they eat other insects. Even though he says that, he exterminates them anyway. The centipedes are getting too comfortable. They stay put on my wall, bristling their legs. The problem with life is that as hard as you try to avoid bugs, you always come across them sooner or later.

No one would blame me for crushing one. I am a human, and this is my home. But I looked at the little body that fell onto the ground like a crumpled-up pair of false lashes for a long time.

If you are listening to this, you are alive. Many people would like to listen to this meditation but are unfortunately dead. Everyone is alive when they are killed.

I threw away the mixer that my dad got me for my birthday. I left it in the street. That way, you don’t see what happens to it after. You can forget that it gets thrown into the growing pile. It is awful to throw away a gift, but it was broken. I twisted around in my sleep, knowing my birthday present was alone on the street, that someone could kick it if they wanted to. I woke up to beeping and looked out my window in time to see it get crushed in the garbage truck compactor.

I bought the shoes that I lost on the subway the day I felt I had really turned a corner. I’ve been adding new phrases to my vocabulary. Turning a corner, giving myself grace, taking steps. I was taking steps towards the shoe store, in a great mood. When I put on these heels, I knew that I could be a new person. They were on clearance, so I bought them.

The shoes were called Colette Pumps. I tried to feel like a Colette as I walked into work. Colette sounds like the type of lady who butters her toast in one swift motion. Colette could laugh and show the perfect proportion of teeth and tongue. Colette lives in a world without bugs.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If you haven’t walked in someone else’s espadrilles, in someone else’s Mary Jane kitten pumps, in someone else’s fringed loafers, then you know nothing. Marianna knows every type of shoe, including my lost shoes, sleeping increasingly fitfully on the subway, waiting to be found.

Marianna will be the first person to have her remains sent into deep space after she dies. I heard it on the news. It will use more fuel than a car could consume in two hundred years.

Delia pretends to never buy anything. She has a water bottle that is metal on the inside and wood on the outside. Whenever I ask about her clothes, she says that her grandmother or aunt gave them to her. At the store, she fills her own glass jars with rice and cereal. The problem with life is that it’s hard to buy a piece of cheese that isn’t wrapped in plastic.

When Delia invited me to her apartment for the first time, I decided to be a machine of friendship, made of coils and metal beams. I practiced every possible way the conversation would go. If she asked how work was, I would say that I couldn’t wait to quit, even though that wasn’t true. If she asked about my favorite food, I might say tomatoes.

I looked in Delia’s freezer while she was in the bathroom, trying to discover the secret of normal living. She had two small pints of ice cream, three different types of frozen spinach, and a damp box of vegan chicken nuggets. I had to close the freezer door before she saw me looking. Did you know about the strong, robust gerbils that were born in space? I asked, trying to make conversation.

The boy who sits on the stoop, the son of either the upstairs or downstairs neighbors, was the one who told me about the gerbils that were born in space. He said, Did you know that those gerbils were born stronger than the ones from Planet Earth? He was holding a big book with pictures of the Milky Way. He read from the book: The pups were stronger and more robust, and they grew longer whiskers than their Earthly counterparts.

I asked the boy, Why were they born stronger? I was taking small, hesitant steps down the stoop from our apartment building, since I was wearing my new Colette Pumps and was in terrible pain. I don’t know, the boy said. The big book did not have an answer.

We have no choice but to eat death. Dead plants, dead animals.

The other day, I was thinking about cars on a highway. I was taking the bus to Goodwill to get rid of some clothes that I didn’t wear anymore. These clothes were heavy with emotion. The shirt I wore when I moved into this apartment. My prom dress with its matching dried flower. A pair of socks with smiley faces that Delia noticed, thus starting our friendship, but that I had since realized were unprofessional and unwearable. I thought about all this on the bus.

I don’t drive. I take the subway to work and the bus to the grocery store. Once I was driving to Denny’s and I made a mistake. I ripped past the edge of the highway, my car falling slickly down a ramp of mud and grass. For a moment, I was upside down, I was dead, and then I was fine, my hands still holding the steering wheel somehow. Shaking, but holding on. I stood on the wild tracks my car had left in the grass while it was being towed, and I thought about all the mistakes I had made leading up to that moment. The problem with driving is that you have to keep going, even after you almost die.

On the bus, I thought about all the poison gases coming out of just one car, about all the cars surrounding the bus, all the highways in this country. I thought about the future time, in which the earth will be on fire. One day all the cars on the highway will want to escape to space.

From the bus, I saw a billboard advertising Marianna. She was holding a bowl of yogurt with pink pieces mixed in, showing everyone how good it tasted with only 100 calories. The problem with life is that everything I like has more than 100 calories, that fruit is spoiling inside stores, and that my hands are too small to carry everything.

The things your brain ignores, Marianna says, include your nose, which sits in the middle of your field of vision, and the feeling of your organs moving around inside of you.

I drink incredible amounts of water, I read thirty pages of a book before bed, and I haven’t eaten a grain in four months. In fact, the idea of a grain disgusts me. I picture a cow munching on oats, turning them into a sludge between boulder teeth. I think about cows being hoisted up into the air before they are slaughtered, the ones who make it to the last cutting machines still blinking and moving, beef expiring uneaten. I am eating clean. I recycle everything. I am very happy.

Every day, it’s like you’re adding a small piece of coal to fuel the incinerator. However, the incinerator is a good thing. Would you prefer to be burned slowly, or all at once?

Nice shoes, Delia said when I wore them to work for the first time. That day, I was also wearing my mass-produced dress. Everyone agreed that it was the Dress of the Summer. I bought it even though I knew there would be another Dress of the Summer the next year. It went great with my Colette Pumps. I gave Delia a billboard smile.

I asked Jim the pest control guy if the house centipedes feel pain. He answered with a firm, No, they are just not wired that way. Jim thinks I am funny. I hovered behind him as he sprayed around the perimeter of the room, trying to read the label on the can. Is it safe to breathe this in, I asked, but all he did was laugh.

When I looked it up, I read that fruit flies experience nociception, which is akin to pain. What does akin to pain mean? I scrolled down the article at a tremendous speed. Bugs, it said, they’re just like us.

Why are the gerbils from space stronger? I have to ask the boy on the stoop. He’s from another generation, he knows more. I wonder if it’s the fact that in space, they’re born under less pressure. In space, there is no universal up or down, only what you make of it.

When Delia invited me to her apartment a second time, we both drank too much. I had recently learned that alcohol had been promoted from a probable carcinogen to a known carcinogen, but I spent all night constantly not thinking about it. She had a suggestion: Let’s make chicken nuggets. She opened her freezer and I acted surprised when she pulled out the box I had seen before: organic plant based preservative free high protein low carb. I could imagine chanting these words to myself every morning, wanting them to work on me.

Laughing, Delia showed me what she had done, how the box was worn with use. She had opened and closed it many times. She showed me the real box in the trash, the regular chicken nuggets that she used to refill the box in her freezer, the kind fried in oil that congeals your arteries into Jell-O.

I started to feel my heartbeat in my neck. The fake chicken nugget box, falsely full of real chicken. I thought about data centers, polyester clothing, heavy metals. I was having a hard time thinking. That’s when I really saw her. I saw a human person with bad posture. The problem is that I started talking. I told her what she was doing wrong: she didn’t drink the recommended amount of water every day. She was just replacing chemicals with different chemicals. Like me, she had always been breathing in poison gases.

I knew I had said the wrong thing, and I started to experience something akin to pain. I tried to change the conversation. I looked over at her toaster and saw that it was the same as mine. We have the same toaster, I said. I know, she said, you told me about it last time. She sounded annoyed.

There was an air conditioning hum reverberating in my skull. I noticed little things in her apartment, a picture of New York City, a purple stuffed cat. I looked at everything because I knew that was the end, that after what I said, I could never go back to her apartment. I said I needed to go home, even though the chicken nuggets were still in the oven, and Delia said, Okay. She was looking at her phone.

I still had to see her at work after that, but I only said hello and that my weekend had been good. I know when people only want to talk to me out of pity. A few days later, I passed another toaster just like ours in a trash pile. It had a small note that said, Take Me, I’m Fine!

After I ruined everything with Delia, I made a list of things I would say if I had someone to talk to: Jim the pest control guy is going on a cruise for a month and wants me to have dinner with him before he leaves, but I will say no. I found a set of house keys on the ground and didn’t know what to do with them, so I threw them in the river. My shirt with the cartoon bear on it got a hole right where his mouth used to be.

This is my last meditation session before my free trial runs out. Afterwards, I will delete the app and try something else to make me feel better. I can bake, crochet, prepare canned vegetables, rescue puppies, learn interior design. There have to be other ways.

For today’s meditation, imagine you are an inanimate object. Nothing can reach you. Nothing can hurt you. Soon we will all be on fire, bathing in the blissful incinerator.

I am a pair of Colette Pumps, seven and a half. I am one of ten thousand. I was designed with memory foam cushions and a flexible sole. I promise not to hurt your feet. I slept in my box for six weeks before you opened me.

I didn’t want to be bought. You paraded me in front of mirrors. You scuffed my sides. You shoved me back into my box without replacing the tissue paper. You handled me roughly as you bought me. I shook in my dark box to the rhythm of your footsteps.

I was born in space, stronger than normal heels. I listened with horror to the roar of the subway. I was lifted off the ground by disgusted fingers. I wailed as the trash compactor locked into place around me. You left me on a dirty floor, let someone throw me away, a new and hopeful pair of shoes. I was going to be so beautiful.

***

Of course, I looked for my shoes. At first, I thought I could do some math. Maybe by multiplying the amount of time it takes the subway to complete a full loop, I could end up in the same train car as before, through the power of hard intellect. But there were too many variables. I started to think about the space between each subway stop, the distance between each car, the eight-minute intervals between the trains, the resigned exhale you hear from the street. Strong, robust rats with extremely long whiskers were breeding under the tracks. I saw a few of them, looking bloated and content. Besides, I needed to get home.

I realized this: it doesn’t matter. We worry too much about when it will happen, but in the end, the train will either come soon or in a long time. And what are you supposed to do? When it comes and opens its doors for you, you get in along with everyone else.

Listen: