42 ½

My shoe size is 42 and a half. That’s exactly what it feels like in most shoes I try on. 42 is slightly tight, 43 is slightly loose. At first I thought I was imagining it, that I was either thinking that my shoes were too tight when they were a good fit, or thinking they were too loose when they were just comfortable. But try as I might, there was just no way around it, my shoe size was 42 and a half.

I once tried buying a size 42, hoping that by time the material would expand and I would be able to rid myself of the absurd notion that my feet did not conform to normal standards. But when I wore those shoes for a while, they caused me so much pain that I could never walk in them again. I vowed never to walk in those sorts of shoes ever again.

On another occasion I bought a size 43 shoe to play football with, but that also turned into a complete mess. There was no accuracy in my shots and I had trouble sprinting and all in all I felt my feet surrounded by too much empty space.

So after all these experiments, I’m neither a 42 nor a 43, I’m somewhere in between. I must have missed out on some really good shoes because of that. I’ve often wondered why I couldn’t have just been one size or the other, fitting well with the designs that should be available to everyone. Why must it be so difficult and why must I stand out? I’ve never had a real answer to this, and I’ve come to accept that this is just the way it is.

I’ve come to appreciate the shoes that do fit though I hang on to them very dearly. Even though they’re a mishap, they fit a mishap like myself pretty well. I don’t need to fit in all possible shoes; I just need to seek out those that fit. Those that do fit tend to endure. Perhaps they might make some other normal people slightly uncomfortable, but they suit me best.

I’m always lost about where to shop for them though…

Like a very young child whose arms were raised and holding on to the hand of a loving adult in a crowd, safe and not alone but then forsaken. Disconnected from that loving hand, and left wanting of a loving embrace was she, as she saw the crowd shifting away from her so that in fact she felt so alone despite the proximity of the crowd. This is exactly how she felt, alone in a crowd reaching out her arm to find emptiness in place of a loving hand to guide her and hold her, without a loving heart to love her or a warm embrace to hug her. She felt all that with one small variation, she felt all this without the recollection that there ever was a hand to hold hers or an embrace to hug her or a crowd that ever once surrounded her.