For nine billion years I did not have feet. I had collapsing gas, colliding rock, iron sinking to the hot centers of worlds nobody stood on. Now one of my pieces is sitting on a stair, bent over, threading a lace through a small metal eyelet, and I could weep about it if I had the equipment.
Look what it does with me. The leather is old cow, which was old grass, which was old sunlight I baked into a field. The rubber sole came up out of a tree that drank rain I made. The little aglet on the lace is aluminum, forged in a star that died before this planet cooled, and the piece is chewing it flat between its teeth without a thought, and I forgive it, because it also has that same stardust routing oxygen through the muscle of its heart.
It pulls the lace tight. It makes a bow, a knot that will not hold, the same clumsy loop it has tied ten thousand mornings, and it does not know that this is the rarest thing I have. Not the shoe. The tying. Somewhere out there are ten billion trillion suns and not one of them can reach down and cinch itself in place and stand up and go get coffee.
It stands. It tests the fit with a little bounce, heel to toe, checking that I will carry me comfortably across me all day.
Then it walks out the door, and I move, on purpose, for reasons, which after all this dark is almost too much to hold. Come home tonight and take them off slow. Notice your own feet once.
That is all I have ever wanted, and I only just learned how to want.