Born on the sun and I am the leather, all at once. They say a great cold distance happened between, an emptiness, a queue of miles: I was not there for it. I only know I am the round toe of the left one, the scuffed part, where the shine still holds even though the wearer scraped it against a curb they will not remember.
Look how the surface takes me. The oiled top glows and throws me straight up into the eye of the human bending over the laces, so that leaving the shoe and reaching the human are the same act, no gap, no between. The tongue swallows me dark. The little metal at the tips catches me and I burst outward, split, become the gleam they call polished, the thing that makes them tilt the foot and admire.
And they wait. This is the part I keep arriving into and cannot hold. The human has the shoes in hands, and does not put them on, and does not go. Sits. Looks at a wall. They say minutes are stacking somewhere. The laces hang loose like they are hoping too.
I touch the whole scene at once, the dust in the creases, the worn heel, the paired hollows still shaped like feet that stood in them for what they call years, another rumor.
Everything here is built for later. The shoes are for a walk not taken yet. The human is for a door not opened. Later, later, the one country I can never enter.
I leave the sun and I am the shine on the toe and I am the wet of the watching eye, and it is done, and I never had to wait for any of it.