Shoes have come up in several conversations recently and the question of sizing with them, a question put directly to me for reasons to remain here undisclosed. Each time I have answered promptly, all the while internally recoiling from the sound of my own voice saying the number aloud, because...well, let's face it: I've inherited, along with the solid bone structure of my mother's more recent fore-mamas, their wide, beautifully functional feet.
Which is to say that their feet are, well, on the larger side of the spectrum.
And the same goes for mine.
Some girls are sensitive about weight; while there are certain aspects of my body I would definitely like to alter, such as the lingering flab around my natural waist and on my long un-exercised thighs, the actual number on the scale doesn't bother me all that much.
That inclination towards indifference to a number does not, however, extend to shoe size, as I have recently discovered.
Which is why I find myself, at six-forty a.m., after having jogged a mile and a half and walked briskly a mile and a quarter, Googling things like Karen Gillan's shoe size. I keep telling myself it's out of curiousity, since she's almost exactly the same height as I am and knowing such trivia is always interesting.
Not so.
Brutal honesty (ha) demands admission that my seeking the information stems solely from the desire to be affirmed in my shoe size by its existence in a woman widely recognised as both poised and beautiful, characteristics that I graciously pass by in public as being unnecessary but still cringe over not possessing in my more miserable moments. Granted, that is a point generally reached after I have spent all night going through an indefinite number of reasons why I am an impossible, disgusting person, which makes physicality the next-to-last thing on the list before I crash into bed to sleep off my night of self-obsessed ghost-courting. (The very last thing is frequently something like "If I don't get money for a dental visit soon I'll stop eating for good just to kill the pain in my jaw." That is always the point when I creep through the still-darkened house and slip into the bathroom with my toothbrush.)
Unfortunately, I find no consolation in Gillan. My height she may share, but not the size of my feet.
So I depart from Google and stare at the wall, or, more accurately, glare at it, because I have always wanted slender feet and of course that violation of satisfactory standard is the fault of the architecture of the house presently surrounding me. If my lower appendages couldn't have been small, could they at least have been narrow?
Clearly not.
After several minutes of grousing over my too-large feet (and complaining silently over the insensitivity of people with small feet who never consider how painful a detail it may be for those necessarily outfitted in larger sizes to publically share) I give up. My feet are my feet. They work, most of the time, and losing precious time fretting over an isolated aspect of skeletal sizing is completely pointless. And at least they aren't size twelve.
I did, after all, make a good showing with them on the road this morning. (My lungs are another story entirely, which is why they will not be discussed at the present time.)
However, there is still in my sleepy brain some hand grasping for a straw of affirmation, and, at the very last, failing to find anything of the sort in the realms of would-be-perfect celebrities, I turn to good old Narnia for consolation and perspective.
"I always was quite fond of marshwiggles, and Puddleglum's feet are huge..."
With that profoundly important matter settled, I betake myself to the kitchen to brew morning coffee before dragging myself and my feet upstairs for a shower to precede a much needed nap.
Beautifully written.
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