Vic 1

From Sokoshinbutsu

Doing it “the right way” didn't seem like it had any of the noble support I recalled from my fascination with feudal Japanese culture. I couldn’t just put out a sheet and empty my shell onto it and expect people to understand and respect my choice, nor did I have the actual guts or the sword.

Small town kids have unrealistic dreams.

I needed to put it off until I’d at least cleaned my apartment, which I hadn’t done and wasn’t about to do.

I did call Fati to ask her about the details of making a will. She asked if I was ok. I am sure I explained in detail how fine I was.

I love a pair of pants that has been worn until its fiber has begun to felt. A pair of khakis that is about to blow a knee is an extraordinary thing to wear. A cotton t-shirt that’s weave has begun to relax, falls in a way that is similar to silk and breathes. Soon it’s seams no longer hold the edges of the cloth. It can still be worn, but perhaps not away from a place of great ease, of explicit comfort under the aegis of domestication.

Old leather shoes take on aspects of the wearer's feet in the same character that long owners of a single breed of dog whisker with age, each becoming the other.

I lit a cigarette and lined up all my pairs of shoes along the front of the couch that faced the tv. I was gonna leave the place tidy. I ordered a dustbuster off late night tv.

I contemplated my life doing key bumps in a chair and sipping bourbon and tap water from a juice glass looking over my row of shoes.

I took off the shoes I was wearing and added them to the rest. I had been wearing a pair of Ferragamo Oxfords to the bar all week through dirty puddles and salted snowy sidewalks. They were speckled with grime and starting to wear thin under the ball of my foot. They weren't really made for walking. I mostly sat at the bar. They’d been my favorite pair of shoes for what seemed like a long time to me,maybe five years. I could see the shape of the bones of my foot in the places where the leather had worn and lightened from bumping my feet against the legs of chairs and barstools and the bar itself. Where my foot and the shoe flexed the leather was beaten but had been spared the nearly disassembling wear of blows backed by my own foot bones- the outside of the ball. My toe pushed against its obstacles from the inside and would surely have got out by now were it not for the nearly thousand dollars in selected leather between my under the table appendages and their invisible obstructions.

I gathered. I ordered. I dusted. I didn't let my task escape me. It was too much when I started. I was worn out. No amount of sleep refreshed me. The direction I had taken toward my joy had defeated its purpose.

My life was the old shirt no new shirt could beat for feel. I saw my reflection in those beat ass shoes like the shallow uncomplicated moral of a February rom com. It seemed to me to be unlike me.

I was unaware how long it had been since I had seen the doctor I visited once a year while I had been actively trading. I called and made the appointment myself.