Added Mar 7, 2024
The shoe asked me, "What will be my future? Will I be red, will I be blue?"
As artists, we often struggle to find inspiration. Some days it comes to us like unstoppable rain and other days...well, we go about flipping every stone in the path to find an iota of the ever-evading mysterious muse. After weeks and months of barrenness, I finally found a little excitement in my sorrows when one of my newest additions to the shoe rack got dirty and damaged beyond repair.
A trip to the shoe laundry, several at-home washes, and DIY remedies later, it was time to put it through the creative channel to salvage the very new, very functional, but badly damaged not-white-anymore pair of shoes.
As I applied one layer of paint over the other, the shoes felt alive. I set it out to dry through the night, and the next morning when I woke up, I saw it shining brighter than the sun, waking me up from my slumber and lighting up my whole 350 sqft mansion! It looked younger, "fixed" almost, and like a blank canvas, and with blank canvases comes their hurried cry for help!
Another bummer!
Historically speaking, in a non-fictional, non-alarming, perhaps even in a slightly stupid way, blank canvases lying around in my sight tend to call out to me in their urgent voices, as if they are lying naked and want me to just dress them up as soon as possible so that no one embarrasses them! Yeah, they talk.
Now, I had this pair of shoes calling out to me as well. It asked me in its now young voice, "What will be my future? Will I be red, will I be blue?"
I stopped and stared at it for a second and sang to it.
Que sera sera. The future's not for us to see. What will be, shall be.
At the time of writing this, the sneaky shoes are taking a nap under one of my tables, all taped up on the edges, and secretly hoping that the doodles I drew in pencil will one day take solid form, and get painted in red, in blue.
