Good shoes take you to good places
–Seohyun
He was given two options; tell everyone and it shall never happen again or keep the experience locked in his heart and relive it again and again. This ultimatum, of course, was given by the pilot he recently befriended. They met on the roof of a building. He was gazing at stars behind the city lights while the pilot was mapping out another adventure. They conversed about the physics and logistics of flying through the stars. The following night, he heard a knock on his window. The pilot was floating on a plane next to him and offered the journey of a life time. He agreed and climbed feet first into the pilot’s helicopter. He was so amazed, tears continuously streamed down his face. As they returned, the pilot offered more adventures beyond his imagination as long as he never told a soul. If too many others attempt to fantasize such a journey, expectations would destroy the beauty. If he so much as gossiped about the pilot or helicopter, all of it would vanish. He could not agree and declined another venture. He jumped out and back into his bedroom, feet first.
She loved love. All she wanted to do was be in love, a feeling she had yet to feel. It was a shame because it was the same week her obsession with love came to be that her doctor said she had one month to live. In that month she was given the world; fancy restaurants every night, two weeks on the Euro Rail, an African safari, six days with her parents and brothers and sisters road tripping through the United States to see her family one last time, to name a few. When it came to the third day, she would supposedly be alive, she realized she never got the chance to experience what she wanted most of all; to fall in love. At fancy dinner that night she thought about her dying heart and considered the reason to be a hole where romance is supposed to live. This thought sent her into a small panic attack at the thought and had to escape to the restaurant bathroom to cry. After a moment or three, she wiped her tears, puffed out her dress, and looked in the mirror. She smiled at the girl in the reflection staring back. “I love you,” she whispered with glee. At that, her heart began to beat so fast with love her body could not support it. She died seconds later in the bathroom. These are the shoes she wore when finally, in love.
Robert Johnson sold his soul for music. What about the girl who sold music for her soul? She was a prodigy. When agile enough to curl her fingers and blow bubbles, she grabbed a harmonica from a corner store shelf display and played Stevie Wonder’s solo in “For Once in My Life” to a crisp. Once she learned how to hold a writing utensil, she started writing her own composition. At the age of 3, she fell upon a piano and trained her ear until age 6 when she took an interest in woodwinds. By the age of 10, music and its beautiful powers had fully consumed the child. At 12 years of age, she was playing Carnegie Hall and conducting at Lincoln Center regularly. For the next ten years, not a day went by that she didn’t perform. If not at a concert, her parents hired her for their Thursday night parties. Once 22 years old, music didn’t quite exhilarate her into the same kind of ecstasy it used to. The love faded and she couldn’t remember how to love anything else. She journeyed to find the one who would take her rhythm in exchange for a loving soul. The day finally came, unexpectedly so as to off-guard her, and the first thing her artificial heart and soul led her to love were these pair of shoes.
She loved to think. She may not have been a looker, though she had elegant features. She was a thinker. She sat daily at the end of her local bar just thinking; analyzing, fantasizing, philosophizing, starting businesses, daydreaming, and thought many great thinks that took her mind on adventures. People would often ask what she was thinking about so much that her nose stayed in a constant crinkle. She could never answer because she hadn't once wrote anything down. The first thought she did write down was a business plan for shoes that protect socks from getting wet when submerged underwater for short periods of time. She now gets paid to think.
He and his wife never spoke. After 49 years in a childless marriage, they learned there was not much else to say unless they were willing to initiate meaningless small talk, which they were not. It’s not that they didn’t love each other, they had grown tired of experiencing it. Nevertheless, they remained by each other’s side, for they preferred to experience everything together. They owned a matching pair of shoes so they would always walk the same miles. For 16 years, the two walked hand in hand, barely speaking a word; until one day they took a busy train during rush hour. A crowd of people broke through their hands and swept his wife away. When the crowd had dispersed, only one of her shoes was left behind. The old man took off his own shoe of the same foot and replaced it with his wife’s. He left his behind, which of course, is identical to anyone else but she would know the difference. They were different sizes after all. After squeezing on his wife’s shoe and abandoning his own, he got on the next train and headed home. They say right after his train left, she made her way back to the station and found his shoe. Before she could get to it, a malicious stranger kicked it into the tracks. Instinctively, she jumped in to retrieve her husband’s footwear, without first looking up to see the train coming.