Yesterday, I received a new pair of Converse All Star sneakers that I customized myself. The shoes are all just one color, which is a purple-like maroon color. I opted for a personal ID and chose to have “plans” stitched on the lower rear in gray. I chose “plans” because it’s a song from Bloc Party’s album, Silent Alarm (which is actually my favorite album ever).
However, these shoes are replacements for shoes that meant a lot more to me since they had a lot more value. They were also Converse, but brown, torn and used. I got them in the seventh grade and have worn them since. These brown shoes had a hole in one of the shoes, but it wasn’t that bad. I would’ve still worn it if I could.
My brown shoes were thrown out by my mother. I’ll never understand why she felt the need to throw out something that I cared very deeply for considering that she is the one person I know who never wants to throw out anything. She’ll even keep pens that don’t have any ink in them and claim that she can make them work later on. In all honesty, I resented my mom the day I discovered that I wasn’t ever going to wear my favorite shoes again. I wanted to break and tear apart something of hers, but instead I sat on a chair and cried over my loss. Just thinking about my shoes makes me want to release a tear still, actually.
My shoes had personality, memories, and holes. They were dirty and they smelled, but I still loved those shoes. I was so devastated because if my life was a bildungsroman, then each scene would feature my brown Converse. It was as if I lost a souvenir of all the great times I’ve had and some of the downer moments, too. I had those shoes through my best moments and my worst, and I kind of wanted to have those shoes with me for the rest of my life. Forever.
People recognized me through my shoes (in a way). My dad and his friends meet occasionally and always bring their kids. Since taking off your footwear is a custom when you enter a Bengali household, my tattered, worn shoes always come off and sat next to the front door or wherever most of the guests’ shoes went. The son of one of my dad’s friends, Abraar, would sometimes say to me, “I knew you were already here because I saw your shoes.” I’ve even formed a friendship with a girl named Dorothy over my shoes. We first started talking about how cool we thought each other’s Converse’s were.
If there’s one thing my friends from middle school will remember me for, it’s for my love of Bloc Party. However, my fanatics toward the band were obvious only because of my shoes, which I scribbed their lyrics on. I also created my own logo for the band and it looked something like this. My shoes were the first canvas for that design and to my dismay, they’re gone and probably recycled.
I’ve always seen people on television losing something that means so much to them. Like, Stephanie Tanner on Full House thought she lost a stuffed bear that her late mother gave her. Luckily, she found it because her younger sister hid it. Ross from Friends thought Joey lost the ring his grandmother had when she first came to the country and passed on to the rest of her family. Alas, the ring was found after they had it surgically removed out of Joey’s duck’s body.
It was touching to watch all of this, but it reminds me that I’m never going to be reunited with an object of so much sentimental value. My shoes documented my tracels and is the only thing that shares the same history as I. My other shoes don’t mean nearly half as much as these now lost brown shoes do.
I’m not an emotional person. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, but when I discovered that I truly lost a childhood possession, I cried and cried and cried. I thought I was going to make more memories using those shoes and I thought I would keep those shoes as a keepsake of my teenage years. I don’t even have anything anymore that carries such a significance like my shoes did. No one understands what I felt when I didn’t have my shoes and I feel like no one will, but it’s hard to put into words what you feel about something when it’s been with you for so long.
My shoes are an unspoken subject among my family, seeing how distraught I was when I didn’t have them anymore. And I suppose that if there’s one thing I would ever hold as a grudge against my mother, it’s her deciding to throw out my shoes. But since I don’t have them anymore, most people would just suggest I get over it. For me, it’s the things I did in those shoes and when the shoes were present for those things. Again, it’s tough for me to explain why these shoes were so special because I come off as indifferent and stolid. I hope that one day I will be able to just shrug it off because right now, it still does bother me. My intentions for “forever” turned out to be something like my overused word, “whatever.”
There’s been a few movies released by Fox Searchlight that have been marked indie successes. Like Juno, which in my opinion, doesn’t have any impressing appeal or acting that is outstanding. Juno wasn’t even completely realistic. But anyway, I wanted to talk about (500) Days of Summer, an upcoming movie starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.
