Shoes That Break Hearts

It was a moonless night, which was suitable for the purposes of Carrot Vines.

Not that Vines was up to some kind of mischief. In fact, Vines was the sort of un-mischievous, uneventful man who tended to perish first in stories dealing with natural disasters. If the novel were to deal with avalanches on snow mountains, Vines would be the character sipping on a hot cup of cocoa, busy correcting alphabetical mistakes on a vague receipt, because it would be too much trouble to run away otherwise.

No, the reason Vines was in such a hurry to walk back home was because visibility was something that happened to other people. As he skulked past a fire hydrant onto the labyrinth that was Virginia Street, his mind performed complex mathematical calculations, noting the lamplight’s angles, the height of trash cans dragged outside townhouses on a Thursday evening, the density of untamed hedges flanking front yards. You see, some people try their best to avoid being seen because they’re afraid of letting others know their secret: they are very good at failing. Sometimes, they fail at failing. Vines had once tried to shave his head and had found out that his hair never grew back again. He’d once tried to boil an egg but had accidentally managed to fry it. Unlike other failures that people tend to learn from, Vines’s failures failed to be useful.

  Kicchik! The sound brought Vines to a halt, alert with furrowed eyebrows. It wasn’t a quiet kicchik, but rather a theatrical, cacophonous snap that echoed up the cobblestones and rattled Vines’s bones. Vines took another step forward, but as has been made clear, some people really are good at failing.

  Vines found his head perplexingly tangled in the prickles of Mrs. Dazzle’s rose garden. Sternly, he squirmed his face out and spun it around like a floppy, loose weathervane in a tornado, wary that someone had pushed him. And then he looked down to see what had abandoned him. He reached forth and grabbed it desolately. There are moments in a person’s life when their heart concedes to shivering over beating. This was one of those moments. In one hand, Vines held his favorite shoes. In the other, he held two rubber soles.

“Don’t leave me,” he whined.

Somewhere around the block, a small child pointed. “Mummy, mummy. Look! That man is talking to his shoes!”

Vines sighed and ignored her. She would understand someday.

The word brutalist is often underused, typically reserved for lackluster, blocky, raw concrete that architects confuse with a building. Had any architect gazed at Vines’s favorite shoes – possibly from behind a riot shield – they would have understood that these shoes were the word brutalist distilled in a whiskey barrel. They were black, scratchy leather wrapped around bricks, shaped more like paws rather than feet, with carvings of what appeared to be a disgruntled moth. The only thing that the shoes succeeded in doing was putting a distance of three entire inches between a deplorable, mushy swamp and the ground. Yet, Vines had found himself drawn to his shoes the same way a chain-smoker is lured to charcoal ashtrays. There was a certain sense of companionship that he felt from the shoes that he rarely felt from organic matter, except, of course, banana peels. While the shape of Vines’s feet barely justified his so-called love, as poets of unknown generations have repeatedly reminded us, love is blind. In this case, it also happened to have scaly, cracked rashes.

“You could’ve rung the doorbell first. It was right there,” Vines said, his eyes still affixed on his shoes as a bulky man allowed himself in through the creaky front door and crawled up next to Vines.

“You could’ve opened the door first. It, too, was right there,” Eric argued. He enjoyed doing that a lot. “What’s the matter?” Eric asked, having run across town at short notice, still huffing and puffing.

“I had a breakup,” Vines muttered.

“Yeah, I know. It was a month ago. And it wasn’t a breakup. You never even dated, remember? A heartbreak? Yes. A breakup? No,” Eric grumbled.

“No, no. She broke up with me,” Vines said, pointing at his shoes.

“The shoes?”

Vines nodded.

“Right,” Eric said, scratching his scruffy beard, perplexed.

“I am serious. Perhaps, at times, it would be nice to know when the next unfortunate event was scheduled to occur. It does not have to be much, you know? A gentle hurricane here or there would be enough,” Vines reasoned.

“They are shoes, Vines. They cannot break up with you,” Eric retorted.

“She was dependable.”

“I remember you saying the same thing about an orange once.”

“The shoes squeaked, Eric! The shoes squeaked! And I know the soles were a bit old and uneven, but all of a sudden, she goes ahead and throws this tantrum, and breaks up with me, and now she wants nothing to do with me. It hurts.”

“We are still talking about your shoes?”

“Who else?”

“Maybe about Bo?”

“This is not about her.”

By nature, Eric was not really an emotional man. According to Eric, feelings were best left to bartenders or people who ate salads and went on long hikes. When Eric was seventeen, he had the biggest shock of his life upon learning that processing feelings did not involve a food blender. Finding Vines cradling a shoe, Eric wondered what the best course of action would be. He’d read in a book once that in times of distress, a good friend should try to de-stress. The book had belonged to a kindergartener.

  “She’s…gone. You have to sometimes…let go of things you love…even if the things you let go of smell of mildew,” Eric whispered, throwing his arms around Vines. “Were the shoes even comfortable?”

“Not really. I could barely walk, but that’s not what shoes are really for, are they? We’ve been through so much together.”

“No, you’ve been in so much together. There’s that night I remember at the kebab store, the night you fell in a koi pond, the night I nudged you into a puddle.” Eric gently plucked the shoe from Vines’s grasp and scanned it with curiosity.

“Shows that she has a strong personality,” Vines said.

“Vines, dear, you’re going to have to let her go now. It’s not healthy. There is no way to-” Eric started, looking for the right word,”-salvage her.”

“But everything I do for the rest of my life will remind me of her. Buildings, skies, grass, cars, books – all of it will remind me of her because she’s the only one I’ve wanted to have fun with. You know I don’t let my guard down, but I did with her. She had her flaws, but no matter what kind of day I was having, she was there for me. I loved doing things that she liked doing. She was like my rock, and maybe…maybe I misunderstood…maybe I began to believe that no matter how many times I messed up, she would understand. But I suppose an apology won’t do now. I tried extremely hard to keep her around because she was worth it. And maybe she’s leaving me now because I am not worth keeping around.”  

“Still talking about your shoes?” Eric squinted.

“Yes,” Vines groaned. “What if she finds someone else? Someone better?”

“I doubt the shoe will find anybody better inside a dumpster,” Eric said. “Although a dumpster might arguably have seen better days than you.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to let go,” Vines said.

“I don’t think anyone ever is,” Eric said.

It was midnight when Vines and Eric stood in front of the trash can. The shoe was on top of the trash can. A raccoon watched it all from the sidelines, nibbling on corn and earthworms. Vines stood there quietly, unable to explain to either Eric or the raccoon that he could faintly hear his shoes whispering.

“It’s time to let me go,” the shoes said.

“But we can still fix it. We can try a bit of glue and hope,” Vines argued in his head.

“It’s not going to be like before. Things will be different and weird.”

“It doesn't matter because you are perfect!”

“If I am perfect and I don’t want you, doesn’t that make you worthless?”

“I guess?”

“And you are okay to live with that?”

“I can pretend,” Vines responded, still in the cavities of his head. In there, he was dancing in front of big crowds, running around like a maniac through a parched desert, climbing his neighbor's tree to rescue a cat, backflipping on water bodies, making wine in his belly button, and doing whatever tomfoolery he could to keep her interested. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”

“Can you be a shoe?”

Vines paused. He hunched and exasperatingly began to fold himself into a fetal position, his arms cleaving their way through a tiny gap between his bent knees and his crotch, rolling up all the way to his neck. His legs curled in so that his face was now sandwiched between his right foot on the top and his left foot at the bottom. The only thing he was missing was a couple of laces and a near-sighted, bespeckled old man at a distance of a mile to attest that Vines did indeed look like a left-sided, size eleven, brown leather brogue. “Eh?” Vines squeaked.

“This is the problem, don't you see? I am not okay with having you pretend to be someone you are not.”

“But I love you!” Vines immediately unfolded back into a human.

“You don't even know what it means.”

“Don't say that! Just because you might not feel the same way that I do does not mean that what I feel is wrong.”

“I never said it's wrong. I'm just saying that it isn't love. If it were, I should have felt the same way, too. I am not ready to give you what you want, and I don't think I'll ever be able to give you what you want. Eventually, I will hurt you, and I don't want to do that to you.”

“We can just delay you hurting me, can't we? Because if you leave now, you are already hurting me. Let's glue you back together and talk about it some other day. Look! You are literally falling apart!”

“Exactly.”

Heartbreak, Vines realized, is almost like poetry, except the verses are sung in dreadful, unharmonious, and dramatic long pauses. It’s the neighbor with a chainsaw and a bubble wrap for a T-shirt that shows up unannounced to ask for help with burying some dead feline in his backyard. It’s a giant, raging wildfire that, unlike most fires, does not warm you up before it burns you. And all it leaves behind is a fog and a question: the fog is a hollow, absent memory of what once used to be; the question, on the other hand, is whether you miss the fog or just something to be lost in.

“This is it, then. I'll see you around,” Vines said, pursing his lips in frustration. The shoes did not answer. They did, however, wink at the raccoon.

“I noticed you are not wearing any shoes. You look shorter,” Eric said as Vines’s mind returned

to the plane of conversations with organic matter.

“I’ll get new shoes, eventually. It’ll be a while, but I’ll get there.”

“Any other new things you might try on?” Eric said, teasing.

“New feelings? Hope? People?”

“You should write a poem.”

“Already did and put them inside one of the shoes."

“Was the poem for the shoes?” Eric asked. Vines shrugged.

“I think this is the only way I knew how to begin. It clings to whatever it can – mugs, photos,

songs. Sometimes, even shoes that someone else might’ve given to you.” Vines smiled, swiveled, and began walking away from the trash can, barefoot but happy to know that even though the cobblestones heckled his swollen feet, he could still walk.

After all, it was never about the shoe.