Shoes
Original art by Corina Nicolescu.
By Corina Nicolescu
I am 1, crawling across the living room carpet towards a colorful ball with Goofy on it. Maybe I’m crawling towards the garage door. Who knows? I certainly don’t. The thoughts in my mind are still just pictures rather than words, so I am not quite sure what my parents mean by “a, uite, dansează” or “a, unde se duce?” or “a, i-a mai crescut un dinte.” But by the time the carpet ends and I place a chubby little hand with chubby little fingers on the cold, smooth tile, I decide to return to the ball. Maybe that’s what it means to be human: to navigate the world without really knowing where to go, to change our plans on the spot according to an impulse, or a gut feeling. To cultivate our feeling of curiosity, to fulfill an eager thirst to learn, always trying to understand the world better.
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I am 2, lying quietly in a hotel bed with a finger occasionally twitching as I am soundly asleep, but I am in another world. In the shock of having been for the first time at something I would later know was a zoo, all my dreams since have been with animals. Now, my mom is carrying me in a kind of backpack contraption from which my legs do a painful split to hang out of special tiny-toddler leg-holes. The gentle sway of her footsteps carries me on a bendy pink path toward a still pink pond with tall pink grass and small pink stones toward a large pink sunset. Behind the pond, there stands an adult giraffe, presumably also pink, but only appearing as black from this direction because of the sunset ahead. On her back there sits a tiny giraffe in a tiny backpack contraption similar to my own. Maybe this is what it means to be human: to take knowledge from other life around us and use it for our benefit. To be wise enough to understand the value of others’ wisdom and use that to better us.
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I am 4, now spending my days at a daycare-preschool building. When my mom lets go of my tacky little hand and closes the door of the room behind her with a small wave, I sit in a corner pouting for the entire day as seconds turn into hours, hours into weeks. I feel as though I have been abandoned for good when my mother finally arrives and takes me home.
It takes me months to get accustomed to this new building with TV-static colored carpets and the gentle smell of the caretakers’ eau de toilette, months which I use to learn English. It doesn’t take me long, given that learning only toddler-level English is sufficient. When I come home and hear my parent’s English, I become sassier than I ever have been, correcting their Eastern-European r’s and l’s.
Maybe this is what it means to be human: to struggle letting go of something familiar, to struggle in a new place with new people with new sights with new smells. To eventually get used to it and let it become just as natural as the original dependence was, almost forgetting entirely about the original struggle that brought us here.
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I am 6, now in kindergarten, with friends who belt out Taylor Swift breakup songs without the vaguest conception of what they mean, who stayed away from me at first because of my short boy-hair, toy dinosaur, red shirts, and jeans instead of blond braided pigtails, dolls with tangled hair, purple and pink shirts and skirts with sequins that leave a trail behind them wherever they go. They somehow manage to make me feel welcome and uninvited all at once, because they teach me their “ways” but also seem to point out all the things about me that make me different from them. They invite me to their playground games and hand-clapping games and include me in plans to meet in the middle of the night to be a part of a rock-collecting club in our tiny courtyard. At the same time, they seem to revere me or treat me like a separate entity, like I am not one of them, because I am not afraid to pick up a worm with a stick and move it over where we wouldn’t step on it, because I don’t care whether my shirt is green or pink, because I can tie a classmate’s shoelaces, because I am able to climb up a metal pole in our playground, because I play with the boys just as much as I do with the girls. They seem to all treat me different, asking me for advice: Corina, we’re playing family and both me and Talia want to be the mom. What do we do? or Corina, do you really think a red shirt makes me just as much of a girl as a pink shirt does? Every time I answer I sense a sort of awe and peculiar trust they have in me. Maybe this is what it means to be human: to try to organize people into categories to better our understanding of the world. To value others’ opinions not despite our differences, but instead because of them, to use them as another perspective to help make sense of the world.
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I am 7, now in elementary school and playing soccer with several other little girls and boys. We are still rather unsure of what we’re doing, so our coaches stand on the field reminding us in which direction we are going and that we have to bring the ball with us to score. I’m sure that nobody’s really paying attention to that but instead to the bag of snacks we’ll get once the game is over. Maybe that’s what it means to be human: to start a journey before you even know where the goal is because by the time we do understand the goal will be so ingrained it’ll seem natural. To understand that we can’t know everything from the start, that learning takes time.
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I am still 7 in elementary school, where I am treated even more differently than before. Because I was so stressed about my jeans and dinosaur in preschool once I realized they made me different, I wear my hair in pigtails with colorful rubber bands that pinch my hair when I take them out. I also wear pink-and-white light-up shoes, a flowery skirt, tights, and a sequin shirt every day. My mom makes sure that the colors all match. Still, I prefer playing tag or the other kids’ primitive version of soccer over the slightly-more-complex versions of hand-clapping games that the popular first-grade girls play, and I’d much rather come home with ripped tights and a scab from tripping on the asphalt playing tag than with painted nails because the girly girls decided to spare some for me. Maybe this is what it means to be human: to manage to still be the same person no matter how many around us try to change us. To still be ourselves underneath the premise of conformity.
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I am 7, in the middle of first grade, having just found out that words spill out of people’s mouths like honey from a tipped bottle. Many people don’t think before they speak, let alone apologize when they realize they messed up. Maybe they don’t realize they messed up, which is maybe even worse.
Because my mom cannot stand the school pizza that looks like it just got ran over by the train and because she just so happens to have a mother who brings the conversation back to food every five minutes, I come to school every day with Romanian mămăligă and sarmale or Italian pasta or Greek salad or Turkish moussaka. But because it is different from what all the American kids are used to, they say my food looks weird or smells weird even when they sit five tables away. I can’t explain to them that they have a limited perspective, because they can only stand to eat chicken nuggets with fries or occasionally a grilled cheese no matter what restaurant they go to and cannot imagine how a vegetable as disagreeable as eggplant could be decently incorporated into food and not ruin it.
Near the end of the year, my only friend asks to go to the park after school, telling me that she has something to show me. She stands behind a swing that I stand in front of, she yells out a joke I can’t remember, and shoves the swing as hard as she can. It hits my lip, hard, and I wear big, black, ugly stitches for a month. In hindsight, she should have realized the trajectory of the swing would hit me right in the face, but it’s too late now.
Those stitches made the same people who gladly told me what they thought of my food gladly tell me about my face, saying I have a bug under my nose and to be careful because it might eat me up whole. The phrases still dribble out of their mouths uncontrollably, but I ignore them, like my mom told me to. It still stings a little though, more even than the needle with anesthesia the doctor gave me before I got the stitches.
Maybe that’s what it means to be human: to only learn from mistakes before we understand the consequences of our actions. To say what we think because we are told to be honest, and learn to speak with care only from being taught about nuance in a frustrated manner lessons from a parent or a teacher, years later.
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I am 8, now a second grader, with exactly two friends who both hate each other. Despite that, they both seem wildly misinformed, in exactly the same way, by the definition of a friendly tease. They both teach me the classic “No offense, but x”, where “x” could be an insult as harmless as “your green shirt doesn’t match your flowery purple skirt” or one as grand-scale as “your project kind of looks bad, are you sure you’re going to present that?” after I spent countless hours trying to put it together. They also teach me to respond with “none taken” after such an insult, and I used to think it was my fault for having so many things wrong with me that they told me “no offense, but” every 20 minutes. Now, I think it’s their problem for pointing out so many things wrong with me. But maybe that’s what it means to be human: to desperately find ways to express our subconscious frustration, no matter at whose expense. To find ways to make ourselves feel better, no matter how many people we have to step on to do so. Maybe that’s just a primitive idea though, and I seriously hope that’s not how the world works.
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I am still 8, now starting 3rd grade at another school, with a full wardrobe change because my light-up, pink-and-white Sketchers don’t fit anymore, and because I need a uniform. Now I wear Converse—shoes I’ve wanted for over a year—on my feet and a red-and-khaki uniform with shorts because I no longer want to feel pressured to wear skirts.
I become friends with the girl at the desk next to me in the same way I was friends with my two second-grade friends, but when she’s gone at lunch one day, I wait for a burst of confidence to talk to a group of four other girls, and find that they are not quite as intimidating as they looked at first. We play “robot” that day, and the next, until we get sick of it, and I forget about the people so concerned on behalf of my food that they would let me know every day, and about the “no-offense” girls too.
Maybe that’s what it means to be human: to keep looking for friends until we eventually find someone, persisting before we really know who we’re trying to find. To understand the value of a good friendship only after several failed ones only by having spent time in those unhealthy friendships and learned from them.
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I am 11, a month before 5th grade ends. Converse are still by far my favorite shoe, comfortable and light and classic and modern all at once, and I am likely on my fifth or sixth pair by now. I look down at them, holding my arms out for balance on a foot-wide slippery plastic border around the bars on our playground. We are playing a game I came up with, which is regular tag played on that border. Running away from the person behind me, my shoe slips off the border onto the ground, twisting my leg sideways, and crushing my knee as I fall. I notice my knee feels weird as I sit down in class again, so I leave for the nurse, who tells me to see an orthopedic, whose office I wait in for two hours until they arrive. After x-rays from all possible angles, they conclude my knee is broken, and I have to wear a brace for three months, halfway into summer break.
They put me in a leg-long brace and crutches, and I hobble into school the next day still thinking crutches are fun because I get to swing every other step. Eventually, people stop being so nice as to bring me my binders and help me get up; my crutches even get stolen by a kid who doesn’t know any better.
Maybe this is what it means to be human: to only learn from the wisdom of hindsight, and to have to make those mistakes first. To learn that there are sometimes consequences to our actions and to think through an idea before fully committing to it; maybe that’s just maturity, but that too is part of being human.
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I am 11, crouched over a practice SAT test, fidgeting with the pencil and bouncing my knee and tapping my finger on the desk trying to focus. It is not quite working, because by the time the timer beeps I have done less than half the questions. I spent an entire hour only to complete 20 out of 50 of them, and I still have two hours left of more writing and math.
I eventually go through what seems like every single practice test there is, until I no longer struggle to finish but actually have time left over. I spend almost each minute of my free time studying, cramming in another 35-minute portion before dinner, and the 80-minute part the next day after school. I keep going until the test formatting is imprinted in my brain, the answer bubbles that never end and the huge test booklet that swallows me whole.
On the test day, I sit in a cold and small room with white lights, long plastic tables, white speckled tile, and a phone basket at the table next to me, with my friend on one side and a confident-looking high school boy on the other. Just like I did for months with the practice tests, I completely focus on the test and only return back to the real world once I’m finished.
Maybe this is what it means to be human: to use ambition to help us do what we love, successfully, and to let it guide our focus for the future. To understand the value of repeated practice and to let our interests guide our focus as much as ambition does.
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I am 12, and it is the last school day before spring break at my first year at a new school. People around me keep mentioning some type of virus that’s spreading quickly, but I ignore it like I do every piece of bad news I hear. One person even starts calling me “Corinavirus.” I tell them to stop, and they do, but it makes me wonder how grand-scale it really is if people are still talking about it weeks later after we first heard about it.
Our week-long spring break turns into two weeks, three, four, until we restart school on our computers. An entire month goes by in which I stay within the confines of my house and backyard, and I hope it will be over when this school year ends.
It isn’t.
In the fall, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, until I realize that this entire year will also be spent at my desk, facing the house across the street and my three half-dead cacti on the windowsill. I lose track of time and effort I spend working, because every day is the same as the last, spent entirely in my room except for when I eat. The loneliness sometimes overwhelms me, which I notice when I lose my focus in class for over a half hour.
Even my motivation is gone, because I see no end in sight. Every day is spent entirely working and working and forcing myself to feel stronger than my stress and consistent lack of sleep spent instead working and working. Each morning I’m just excited to go to bed that evening. Every few days I am again overwhelmed and can't focus because I’m stressed but I’m stressed because I can’t focus and the work keeps piling up and there’s never any free time for me to spend because I keep working and feel guilty when I go to sleep because I never get as much done as I had hoped. Some mornings I find tens of tissue wads kicked under my bed because I didn’t feel like throwing them away the night before. I can’t take it anymore, I can’t even look at myself in the mirror and recognize who’s looking back. I don’t have such dark under-eyes, I don’t have such swollen eyelids, I don’t have such greasy hair that I have to braid every day for it not to show.
When school is finally over, my exams taken and my grades finalized, I feel free and as though I can take a breath again. Although it’s a slow process, I start seeing the good parts of myself instead of only my faults, so I take care to avoid my own destruction as I better myself.
In the summer, I cut my hair even shorter to change even more from the person who I was, and I am back in my school Converse shoes again, remembering the nice light feel of them on my feet which I have missed for over a year. Maybe this is what it means to be human, to rely on a stable base in our lives and fidget until we find it again. To let struggles in our lives guide us until we find that base again and to return stronger than ever before.
Photo courtesy of Corina Nicolescu.
Corina Nicolescu is a third-year student at the Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada. She was born in Reno, although both her parents are from Romania. In her spare time, she enjoys writing, skiing, and playing soccer.
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