Today I woke up rather early but took time getting dressed because I washed my hair with conditioner and then sprayed my wrists and neck with perfume, two activities which take a little long to accomplish with satisfaction. The effect of these activities was that I did not have time to select a pair of socks, put them on, and then wear the pair of shoes which has rubberised soles and a body impervious to water. For context: it has been raining here for the past couple of weeks and the place was only a tiny bit away from becoming a permanent marsh. Why didn’t I have time? My friend was waiting for me.
I reached the cafe where my usual seat was vacant and I planted myself there, sipping a tepid cappuccino punctuated with similar sips of plain water. After a while I became aware of my ‘formal’ pants and ‘formal’ shirt which gave me a sense of perfection. However, as my thought travelled southwards, I was violently reminded me of my open-toe sandals scandalising the perfection of my apparel. I fantasised about wearing the water-repellent, firm-gripping, tok-tok sounding shoes and how perfect I would have been if I had worn them today. As I felt that sense of perfection in my body despite the absence of the said shoes, I wondered how different it would have felt if I had worn the black, unopinionated pair of shoes whose body was made of water-absorbing fabric and whose soles were hard rubber which did not grip the ground as well as the other pair and whose sound-making capacity was almost non-existent. I also thought about the black boots which I had worn on the snow-lined streets of Scotland and wondered whether they would hold out even in a downpour.
As I felt the presence of the two pair of shoes which were absent on my feet, I began wondering about how real their presence felt. Although the shoes were away from me by more than a kilometer, they were as present on my feet as the pair of my open sandals I was wearing. As I felt their presence on my feet, I also felt confidence and sass growing in me and rendering me desirable to the opposite sex and enviable to my same sex. Although the guy sitting by the other table was wearing a hoodie and a pair of shoesâtwo objects which makes a person perfectâhis pair of shoes had three colours on themâwhite, green, and blackâand looked like any other pair of shoes, and hence not worth remembering. The same was the case with the girl sitting at the next table, wearing a hoodie and a pair of jeans. Her shoes were blue and white and their material was too thick and betrayed their wet-ability. Not to mention the gold-rimmed glasses which made the entire thing tasteless.
Then there are people who are perfect even with open-toed sandals. (The hoodied girl has shifted her legs and now I can see the grey stripes in her shoes which were invisible to me before.) I wonder whether people look perfect in regular thong-style flip-flops and decide maybe Emma Mackey might be able to wear them and still look attractive. The guy wearing spectacles with legs shaped like a lightning bolt looks horrible. It is not the tasteless spectacles but the man carrying himself with a weight of importance that makes his entire being tasteless. The tasteless spectacles just add on to the overall tastelessness. There are more men and women moving around wearing shoes and they are: fully off-white with an elastic band closing on the ankle, a white-and-pale-blue pair which do not land fully on the ground but levitate ever so slightly because of the way the wearer walks, and the pure black shoes worn by the barista who looks like she does not care about the shoes in the very least.