“We already got you measured,” Mum says, tying my shoelaces. “These are your size.”

My feet are aching inside white sneakers, toes squished together. They’re too small, but Mum isn’t listening. She’s frazzled, anxious that I won’t get to school on time for the athletics carnival, so I won’t race the fifteen hundred metres, so I won’t qualify for interschool, so I won’t get into state championships, so I won’t be something to be proud of.

“I can’t run in these,” I say, trying to wriggle my toes. “My feet are suffocating.”

She scoffs, tugging the laces into a taut double-knot and motioning for me to give her my other foot. She doesn’t wait for me to move before she grabs my ankle and pulls it towards her, yanking the laces tight.

Mum wouldn’t let me wear my old running shoes. She says I grew out of them, but I say I wore them in. They fit when I first got them, but I’d changed shoe size since then and my toes rubbed twin holes in the sides as I grew. She said the holes meant they didn’t fit, but I could run in them and that’s all that mattered.

“These are exactly your size,” she repeats. “Besides, they’re the biggest ones they sell here.”

I don’t know why she isn’t looking at the other half of the store to find bigger shoes, but it’s not my place to question it; she’s paying for them.

Besides, it’s how it’s always been.

***

When I was a kid, my favourite shoes were a pair of off-white high-top Converse. I wore them every day, until they were held together with disintegrating canvas and hope.

Once I got over my fear of getting them dirty, I started drawing on them. I covered them in permanent marker doodles and pen scribbles, inside and out. Under the tongue I confessed my crushes and admitted my fears, on the sides I wrote lyrics to my favourite songs, and on the underside of the sole I drew galaxies to run atop the stars.

Every few weeks, I’d wipe the toe caps clean before covering them in new designs and new words and new dreams.

I cried when I started puberty, mostly for reasons I didn’t understand, but also because I outgrew my shoes. I tried to keep them in my bedroom anyway, a reminder of something too big for me to know how to articulate, but they vanished the next time Mum cleaned my room.

***

I’m sitting on the floor by the door, my back against the wall. My feet started hurting hours ago. Once I see someone else take their
shoes off, I kick off my heels and fling them towards the corner of Jacob’s bedroom.

The room is hazy around me, voices melting into incoherent vibrations in the air. I scan the room to see four vaguely familiar blurred faces. There are three people on the bed. I know their faces but not their names. Jacob’s work friends, I think.

Jacob is next to me on the floor. He’s not as drunk as I am, since he’s an over-anxious host constantly making sure everyone’s having a good time. I don’t know what sort of time I’m having.

I’m picking at the carpet beneath my hands when I notice a pair of cherry red Doc Martens beside the bed. Their surface is shining, calling to me. I try to sit up to reach for them, but the world tilts and I sit back again.

“You good?” Jacob asks.

I nod. The world keeps spinning. Or maybe it’s my head.

“Are they yours?” I ask, gesturing towards the Docs with one boneless arm. I don’t wait for him to answer before I ask, “can I wear them?”

I watch his mouth form the shape of a yes and reach for them again. The world dips and spins, but Jacob steadies me.

Up close, the shoes are gorgeous. They’re everything I want to be. They stand out, not pristine but still bold, and will take whatever gets thrown their way without letting it damage them beyond repair. If anything, their damage gives them character. The scratches, the scuffs, the slight wear on the leather. Evidence of life.

I pull them on and clumsily tie the laces. There’s something odd I can’t place, like something is missing.

“They fit?” Jacob asks.

Or like something isn’t missing.

My feet, conditioned to curl my toes before shoving them into too-small shoes, aren’t in pain. In the rush of trying on Jacob’s shoes, it didn’t occur to me to shrink myself down.

“They fit perfectly,” I say.

***

I’ve never been good at fashion. I don’t have a sense of what looks good and what my friends think is cool, so I try to fake it. It works until it doesn’t. Now, looking at the reflection in the dark window of the train heading into town, it doesn’t work.

Besides Jacob, my friendship group consists of myself and four girls. Four other girls, I mean. And women, I mean, not girls; we’re adults now. We’re women.

A shudder of discomfort runs through me after referring to myself as a woman. I chastise myself for being a bad feminist. As a woman—there it is again, that unsettling wrongness—I get infantilised often enough, I don’t need to be doing it to myself.

Sandwiched between my friends on this otherwise empty train, I feel out of place. Even after consulting the group chat for outfit advice earlier, I feel like I’m wearing a costume. I’m not dressed that differently to them, and I’m wearing the same black heeled boots as Emma, but it feels different somehow.

She’s at ease. I’m unbalanced.

***

The doctor prods my broken foot and asks if it hurts. It does.

He prods my big toe and asks if it hurts. It does.

He prods each of my swollen toes and asks if it hurts. It does.

He comments on my curled-in toes. I tell him it’s because I wore too-small shoes throughout my adolescence.

He asks if there’s any possibility I could be pregnant. I say no.

He tells me to decrease anxiety and stress and my feet will get better.

I tell him my foot is broken. He tells me about birth control.

***

Unsurprisingly, months of isolation from friends and loved ones changes the way you see yourself. It also strengthens the allure of online shopping to feed that growing chasm beneath your chest.

I stop having friends around to compare myself to. I learn how to exist within my skin and occupy every inch of my body. My toes uncurl, my shoulders straighten, my chin rises. I let my leg hair grow out. I run my fingers through it, the coarse texture not repelling me but instead filling me with a sense of being whole. It’s an unfamiliar sensation.

I stop filtering exclusively for men’s shoes or women’s shoes in my online searches, instead prioritising size and style over labels. I stop listening to brands and adhering to expectations. I stop looking for neat and easy answers. I unequivocally stop giving a fuck. When it’s hard, I fake it. It’s often hard.

A brand-new pair of cherry red Docs arrive at my door. I fantasised about changing into the perfect outfit before they arrived so my first time wearing them would feel powerful, but I don’t. I’m too impatient. It feels powerful anyway.

The pain of wearing them in pales in comparison to the euphoria radiating through me as I walk around my apartment. The pain lessens with each tentative step until I forget to count my steps at all. I stop expecting pain.

I draw galaxies beneath the soles.