From where I stand, your shoes are not two objects but one long ribbon of leather and rubber running out of a hillside somewhere, through a machine, onto a shelf, onto your feet, and eventually thinning to a soft flat nothing pressed into the mat by your door. I can see all of it at once, the whole worn arc, and it is lovely, the way you unknowingly sculpt them.
You are tying them right now. Yes, you, the hands holding this. I watch your fingers make the loop the exact way you made it at six, sitting on a step, tongue between your teeth, while someone larger crouched to check your work. The motion never left you. It is the same loop.
From here the six-year-old and the person reading this are one continuous gesture, bending toward the same two laces, and the crouching figure is still crouched, still there, just a little further along the ribbon than you can turn to see.
The left one wears faster. It always has, all the way down the shape of you, because of the way your knee will ache in the winters ahead, the way it aches a little already. The shoes know your walk before you take the step. They are shaped like every place you are going and every place you have stood.
Do not grieve the pairs that thinned to nothing behind you. Nothing thinned. They are all here, every sole you ever pressed into the world, still holding the print of your foot, still warm. You are wearing all of them at once.
So am I, watching, standing in the doorway of this exact second with you, where the laces are only ever just now being tied.