shoe
There was one morning I stepped into my shoe without proper care and folded the fabric inside the heel tab. I didn't have the five seconds to sit down and use both hands. It was a new pair of shoes, too. But it folded, and I felt it fold, and every time I wear these shoes now I feel the lump against my Achilles' heel reminding me of those few seconds I slipped into indifference and made an irrevocable change. It's damaged inside. I feel it as I walk. Just the right foot. Sometimes it feels as if I'm limping because of it, like the mistake is moving into my tendons, little shoelaces tightening into my veins. And the more I get used to it, the more this strange expectation grows: somewhere in my subconscious, I assume that my shoe will heal, that it is a part of my organism. That in the natural course of the world, the shoe will one day grow itself a new heel tab. I'll wake up one morning and I won't feel that fold anymore, the one hidden under the leather, the discomfort that is invisible to the world. But then I remember— it won't. Shoes are not skin. They don't heal.