Somebody wore these to nothing. The heels are ground down on the outside, the left more than the right, from ten thousand ordinary steps across kitchen tile and parking lots and one long hallway to a room where the news was bad. Laces knotted twice because they slip. A dark tide-line of salt where the leather met snow.
Every mission we ran, the ground was the enemy. Getting up off it, getting back down onto it without dying. We spent billions to leave it and billions to touch it again. And here is a person who did it fifty times a day, without thinking, on two thin slabs of rubber, on a rock spinning at a thousand miles an hour, held down by a force nobody up there can feel until they come home and their own feet betray them at the bottom of the ramp.
From orbit you cannot see a person walking. You cannot see the person at all. You can barely see the city they walk in. The whole living skin of the planet, every step ever taken, fits under a fingernail held up to the window.
These shoes are worn out because they were used. Because somebody had somewhere to be, and legs that worked, and air to breathe the entire way there. That is not a small thing. I have counted the days of air a body carries strapped to its back. Down here you get it free, and you spend a lifetime forgetting to notice.
I picked them up to throw them out and put them back by the door instead.