That’s Everything Too(The Pointe Shoe)

I was pretty once. The girl pulled me from the box and held me to her face like I was something holy. She breathed me in. I was pink and clean and she loved me before she even put me on. Then she broke me. She bent me backwards until my spine cracked. She soaked me in water and wore me wet so I would dry into the shape of her foot. She hammered me against doors. She made me hers. I thought that was the hard part. I was wrong. The first time she bled on me, I wanted to cry. A small red spot inside my satin, right where her big toe pressed. But she just looked at it, touched it with her finger, and kept going. After that, the blood came every day. She wraps her feet in tape and lambswool, then stuffs them inside me. But the tape tears. The wool slides. Soon it’s just her skin against my skin, and her skin is always wet and always raw and always leaving pieces of itself behind. I hold her toes the way a coffin holds a body. At night she peels me off. I hear her gasp. I see her feet. God, her feet! They are not feet anymore. They are meat and nail and open places where the skin forgot to stay on. She touches them gently, like they belong to someone else. Then she wraps them fresh and in the morning, she puts me on again. I don’t know why she does this. She calls me her shoe. But I am her punishment and she wears me like she deserves me. Then last night, something changed. She took me off slowly. Not the usual rip and toss. She sat on the floor and untied my ribbons one by one, like she had all the time in the world. She held me in her lap and just looked at me. Then she pressed me to her chest and cried. Not the loud kind. The kind where the whole body shakes but no sound comes out. I felt her heart beating against my satin. I felt her tears soaking my stains. She whispered something. “I know. I know. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to herself. To her feet. To the girl she used to be who had pretty pink shoes and didn’t know what was coming. And then, quietly, she wiped her tears. Put me back on, started the music and rose up. Someday they will cut me off her with scissors and throw me away. She will get a new pair. Pink and clean. She will break them too. I will be in some dump, rotting, my satin full of her dried blood and the shape of her toes still pressed into me like a prayer. She won’t think of me again. But I will think of her. I will think of the weight of her body rising in mine. I will think of her heart beating against my satin that night she cried. I will think of her whispering sorry to her dear feet. I will hold her forever, even when there is nothing left of me to hold her with. That’s all I was ever for. That’s everything too.

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