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A Poem by Colleen K.
Growing up,
It was common to go through different shoes.
This made sense to me.
It wasn’t as though I had imagined myself
Walking at my high school graduation
In the same pair of neon pink converse
That I had worn on the first day of kindergarten.
Sometimes my style changed,
So that the same pair in which I had once treasured,
Became unattractive to me.
So, I would give them away
To someone else who wanted them.
But other times my feet grew so large
That the same pair that had once been a perfect fit,
Left me with blisters on the short walk home from school,
And a noticeable pain
Every time that I tried to move forward.
My mother would decide that these had to be donated
To someone who could still make use of them.
Even if I wished that that person could have been me,
Reluctantly,
I would hand them over.
As I got older,
My feet stopped growing.
Yet suddenly I was losing more shoes than ever before.
Some would disappear so quickly
That it would take weeks for me to notice that they had left.
And by then,
They would belong to someone else
Who didn’t take them for granted,
Someone who noticed right away
When they stopped showing up.
I had a few pair that fell apart
While I was still wearing them.
I had developed a bad habit of dragging my feet as I walked,
And I’d never bothered
To take better care of them.
There was a period in time when this made me angry,
As pairs of shoes came and went
In all kinds of ways,
Whether I wanted them to or not,
I couldn’t stop them from leaving me.
So I would yell when they wouldn’t stay,
Before remembering that shoes
Are not meant to remain in one place.
They were shoes,
And they were made to move forward.
After being away from home,
I looked inside of my closet and was confused
As I couldn’t recall when every last pair had left,
And been replaced by another
That I didn’t recognize.
It was then that I realized how much I missed a lot of my old shoes,
And wished that I could have done things differently,
Maybe if I had just picked up my feet...
Or remembered them after gym class...
Then they would still be here.
I wish this were the case
Because I haven’t gotten used to my new shoes yet,
And sometimes they feel so unfamiliar
That I don’t wear them at all.
But I can’t walk barefooted,
And I miss my old shoes.
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