Colby's Shoes

Colby has twelve pairs of athletic shoes. A dozen pairs, high-end, superstar-named. All twelve pairs are white, pure white, a white so dazzling it blisters the eye. He takes the time each evening to clean the pair he has worn. It is light duty, though. He is careful, so careful that they seldom suffer even a smudge. He cleans them anyway. He does it secretly. He has a special technique, a process he himself created, and he refuses to share it. He thinks he’ll patent it.

Colby never leaves the residence hall for class without plotting the path of least impurity, the one least puddled by last night’s rainfall or early spring’s melted snow, the one least littered with the brown mash of concrete-abraded leaves, the mudless path, the path unsullied, undefiled. The pristine path. And when he walks, he monitors each footfall, deliberates where and how to place each footstep. Each step he takes is an act of exquisite awareness, a conscious decision. Any waver of attention could cause a blemish, a blotch. A scuff would be cataclysmic. For Colby, every walk is a psychodrama, or, maybe, a pilgrimage.

Colby’s shoes are not shoes. They are Colby. They say, “See, when I have money, how carelessly, how redundantly, I spend it.” They say, “Look how I curate my life; see my tenacity, my implacability; look how I keep the stone I shouldered up the hill from rolling back down.” They say, “I will not amble; I will not be nonchalant.” They say, “See the poetics of reverence.” They say, “I am a border at which you are denied entry.”

Colby the ever-vigilant, the ever-wakeful, the ever-surveillant. Colby, always on watch, on guard, on high alert. Colby the meticulous, the painstaking, the wary. So hyper-aware and so thoroughly distracted. So present and so elsewhere. I see him coming, head down, eyes one step ahead of his last sedulously-placed step, fearing, always fearing, to put a wrong foot forward, to suffer a splatter, to be ambushed by a stain.