The Boots

The life I have been given is by far better than the life I thought I wanted

The Boots

There are many ways to travel, not all of them equal. Some drugs can be an effective way to journey deeper towards yourself. Use them incorrectly, however, and you will sail right past your centre and into a very unpleasant place from which you may never return. Don’t bother with too much alcohol. That stuff only takes you away from yourself, eventually. Then there is singing and dancing and painting and laughing. All good and risk-averse ways of coming home to yourself. Of course, there are also the great plains of the dreamlands, where wanderers can gather fruits of wisdom to nourish us during the waking hours. But only if you know where to go looking.

But by far the most effective and least pleasant of all ways to travel is through pain. There is nothing like enduring sorrow and grief to propel you years ahead of yourself. There is no tincture more potent than a cocktail of sadness and fear to fortify you into the person you never dreamed you’d be strong enough to become. I’ve got buckets and buckets full of pain, and I am sure that you do too. Frida Kahlo wrote that “pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.” I have found her to be right, and one day I am going to show you just how beautiful my pain has been.

Forgive me, I have sinned. For a very long time did not know how to love. So I have known pain: great, weeping welts that began in my mind and expressed themselves through my physical form. I became physically unwell from the pain of mistaking acts of cruelty for acts of love. If you have suffered great injustices and your pain means absolutely nothing to you other than unwarranted and unfair suffering, then you must be right too. I believe you. Because I am often too quick to abstract lofty ideas from small and meaningless happenings. Not everything has to mean something, does it?

I have snakes, just like the writer Joan Didion did. I love that footage of her as an elderly lady, staring at the camera with her shoulders hiked right up to her ears, speaking along with her hands and asking the interviewer: “do you have snakes too?” He does not know what she means, but anyone who does have snakes knows exactly what Didion is on about.

When I was a girl, I went on holiday with my family and my best friend to a place called Kosi Bay, in South Africa. My little friend and I went out one morning to the long-drop outdoor toilet at the edge of the camp. I sat my 6-year-old rump over the great hole and watched while peeing as a long and beautiful green snake wound itself between me and my little friend. I couldn’t possibly remember, but I suppose there was a moment of marvel, that the snake must have smiled at me before we burst through the door, pulling up our knickers screaming “toilet snake!”. Our fathers went along with the rest of the camp to investigate the scaled-intruder and came back with reports of having spotted a green mamba. The second most deadly snake in South Africa. It can’t mean anything, except that at the most turbulent junctions of my life, I have dreamt of snakes. When I suffer in the waking hours, my snakes come to me at night.

I am a content woman now and have not dreamt of my fork-tongued friends for some time. I keep reminders where I can though, and instead seek out snake-themed trinkets and keepsakes. Inconsequential pieces of costume jewelry that make me feel safer when I walk home alone at night. None of this means anything but the other night when I was dreaming, I did travel to an extraordinarily wintry landscape and found myself in a lively old house from whose windows I watched a blizzard of snow whirl about outside. This house was filled with rows upon rows of vintage books that came to life with animations when I opened them, and stacks upon stacks of gilded furniture. Upstairs, I found racks stuffed with fur-trimmed 70s coats and, even in my dream, I told the shop-owner thank you but no thank you, I’ve not the dream coins for these.

And there, at the end of the rail of coats, hung a series of patent leather snakeskin boots. Cream and black and purple pairs of knee-highs, some with chunky 70’s heels and others built with stiletto points. And I tell the lady thank you but no thank you. I’ve not a penny for boots like these, not even here, in my wild, frozen dreams. I woke up and told my bedfellow about the boots, and spent all morning trying to make sense of the dream. I’ve read Karl Jung’s book about dreams but the language he uses is difficult and I still don’t understand what he understood, I still cannot see what he saw. So most likely the dream meant nothing.

I went about my day, forgetting the boots in the white night. Having slept so well, I decided to go for my bi-annual run, and so stuffed my unusually large feet into my ugly running trainers and headed down towards the river that cuts through the city like a great, sleeping serpent. It’s true. I do have unusually large feet. I've always felt I wasn't tall enough to merit such large walkers, that I've been short-changed somehow. I feel the same way about my hair, that my colouring is in every way the colouring of a redhead, except that I do not have red hair. When I was little it was strawberry blonde, but life seems to have washed out all the colour. I often joke that the printer ran out of ink when they made me, and I make myself laugh every time. I like to think of my flattened body sliding out through a copy machine and the gods tutting, sending my prototype off for the head office's approval anyway, because they've got to get on with making some more lives. Perhaps they intentionally made my feet so big because they knew I was going to spend so much time with my head in the clouds or gazing at the moon. Perhaps the gods looked at one another and saw the way the stars had been aligned for my arrival into this life and said, put some extra weight at the end of this one, otherwise she might float off. If you do not have gods, or perhaps have only one, then that is OK too. For a very long time I did not have gods and I don’t expect that you should change your mind.

I almost run right past the Sunday crafts market. I’ve already the wind catching in my hair as I sprint down the hill and I’ve neither the time nor the money for shopping, but I stop dead in the street when I catch row of colour sail right into my field of vision, a row of something I remember, a place I think I know. I reverse back up the hill like a ropey old car in a 90s film and smile to myself because I’ve seen this vintage stall before and I know the owner never has my size. Still, I hear myself asking anyway – “do you have anything in a size 41”. To my astonishment, the stall owner moves around the display to stand next to me and picks out a pair of black stiletto-heeled western style boots and says ever so calmly that she has these, a pair of real snakeskin, hand-made boots from the 70s she found in Argentina.

Once again I check the price tag and once again I say aloud “I’ve not the money for these” and once again my body runs away from me and I’m round the back of her stall, on the steps of her van trying them on and they fit. Just like a shoe should. In that moment, with my foot so comfortably nested inside what once encased the blood and spirit of a black snake, I have a brilliant thought: “remember to reserve it this time”. I blurt out, a bit too loudly, a bit too jubilant, “can I reserve them?” And I tell her all about The Dress, and about how last time I forgot to reserve it and she smiles and says “are you going to pass the test this time?”. I say I will have to think about it, and she agrees to put them away for the rest of the day.

I run faster than I think I can sustain for very long. Faster than the river and against its current, and all the while I am thinking, thinking, thinking what can it all mean? What am I supposed to learn, who am I supposed to be now? The kind of woman who wears stiletto snakeskin boots to Monday morning meetings? The kind of woman who never has to think twice because she knows exactly what she wants and what she is here to do? Yes, surely, that’s the kind of woman who bought those boots back in Argentina, back in 1970. My large-footed sister. That’s the legacy I am here to continue. If I am just careful for the rest of the month, I can afford it this time. I turn around mid-route and flow back down to the market place along with the river, running faster and faster. This time I think I can hear the Gods yelling and imagine that Zeus has his top off, and is waving it around, spilling expensive wine and mighty Athena is rolling her eyes at her father because she knows this is a bad idea but, at this moment, I am a hedonist trapped in a human body so I run all the way to the cash machine and take out the money out. I hold the notes in my fist as though I’d just plucked a bunch of wildflowers straight from Earth and thrust my bounty in front of the lady saying “I’ll take them” and she smiles and says “I knew you would come back.”

And I go home. And my roommate laughs when I walk in because didn’t I just leave for a run 20 minutes ago and wait did you buy shoes? I put them on with my running gear and wear them all Sunday around the house.

It takes me just one afternoon to realise: I can’t walk in them. That, in fact high heels, made half a century ago are quite difficult to balance in. The very best I can do that Monday is wear them seated in my Zoom meetings, because I work at home. From my bedroom. With my cat.

I have not worn them a day since.

There is one form of pain I have not yet mentioned. And that is the pain of having thought that life was going to turn out to be something other than it is. That you spent your whole life waiting to be richer, or younger, or older, or thinner, or curvier, or braver or drunker and still, life did not arrive as you had expected. I would like to speak of the pain of having misfired a shot, of having been over-ambitious, of having thought you were something other than you were, that life was anything other than it is. And in your desperate search for something better out there, you accumulate painful memories of all the things you said and did in an effort to go somewhere you thought you were supposed to, that was never really meant for you after all. It is the very pain of being human, of living life for the first and last time, and knowing we are going to get it wrong again and again and again, right until we die. It is this shame, I think, that has hurt me most deeply.

And when I feel like this, I do what I have learnt to do. I stand in front of the mirror, stare myself in the eyes and tell the woman looking back at me that I forgive her. My eyes are hazel but sometimes, in the right light, with the right amount of imagination, they could be green and sometimes, when the lights are low, they are brown and always they are lovely and sparkle with ideas. My hair is the colour of ash where it once was strawberry blonde. It is beautiful, and for a small sum of money I can throw my head over the sink and dye it a burning auburn if I so choose. My feet are perfect. They have carried me a very long way indeed. Of course, the gods do not wear suits, and thank goodness for that. What a bland little world we would be living in if it had been left up to my imagination. Had my life gone according to my own designs, I'd be a widely published but undeveloped writer, I’d have nothing to paint at all, and the gods would be slugging cheap office coffee, staring at numbers scattered into a spreadsheet wondering what they were going to do with all of this eternity.

The life I have been given is by far better than the life I thought I wanted.

You have to learn to really listen to life, because it does not seem to work the way we think it does at all. A does not always lead to B does not always take us towards the better job or the bigger house. We have to keep travelling anyway. Playing it too safe might just work but it might just land you right back where you started, empty-handed and wondering where you've been all this time and what it was all for, if it was not for true love’s sake.

I have started to spend a good deal of time thinking about how I'm going to die. I hope to pass my last days in this world bedridden on a small boat for one, moored to the harbour receiving friends and family who've come after the school run, to fill the deck with flowers and eat sandwiches together while someone changes my bedding and paints my nails red. And then, once time has stretched my skin so thin you can see the light of the next world shine right through my face, my daughters and granddaughters will sit at my bedside and say:

“Grandma was free. All her adult life she tried to love and she tried to listen. Even when she was sad and angry and afraid. She lived her whole life as though each moment was a painting. And she loved each gift the Gods gave her. Especially the ones that hurt.

Their voices will carry my soul’s light into the next, dark place and the last thing I will know from this world is the smell of my youngest grandchild's breath, which bears the sweetness of the red apple they have just taken a bite of, as they kiss me on my forehead and whisper:

"Grandma, I'm going to wear your magic boots."

Original artwork by me, Eleanor Flowers, and my cat. 
'The Way We Hurt Each Other': Pastel on paper, 2022.
Follow my Instagram: @flowerseleanorflowers