My father's shoes

What happened to me on Monday was so intense, I couldn't even think about writing about it until today....  late today, as you can see...

As with most things that are unexpected, it all started innocently enough:  "Hey, Baby, check out these shoes I just bought".  No big deal.  My husband bought new shoes and he wanted me to see them. 

So I went to our bedroom to have a look.

There, being showcased by my husband's hands were the cause of something unexpected:  My father's shoes.

This was not a joke, and it isn't one now.  But just as I saw them for the last time about 27 years ago, under a spotlight of emotion were shoes so incredibly identical to the ones my father wore they took my breath away.

I quickly buried my face into my husband's chest.  I wanted to run away.  I couldn't even describe what I was feeling, what I had seen, or how I'd seen it, but I had seen my father.  More and worse than that, I felt him.  Within a hundreth of a second I felt his impending prescence, what it felt like, that childlike joy I had felt so long ago knowing he would come home after he'd been working, being in a room where he could possibly be or would be in; morphed into the present possibility of him still being alive...  back from the dead...??

It didn't help me not to see his body after he passed away, although it was something my mother thought she would shield me from when I was 12.  She didn't want that last impression of his lifeless face etched in my mind.  But now it is something that has left my life peppered with dreams of him still being alive, as recent as a few months ago.  That recurring dream in which my family confesses to knowing he was still alive and in hiding for most of my life, in a place he moved away to so as not to hurt us anymore. 

The shoes were still there, but I couldn't even look at them.  When I did, I noticed that they even had that little right-to-left hairline crease from having been walked in, which made it all seem even more real.  These shoes were the one design I ever saw my father wear, in black, brown, shinier or matte and when once they gave me a certain comfort, they were now enough reason for me to want to run away.  Hard as I tried, I couldn't look at them anymore, I haven't even looked at them since.

I love those shoes.  As a matter of fact they have always been my favorite design, for obvious reasons... but they now became a new, albeit small lesson on life: 

There are times when you cannot face something you love because you just love it too much.