Hooves

There's an Asian couple that's been walking for more than an hour, with colorful umbrellas, in front of our house. They would go to the end of the block, and then the other end, and then loop back around. They're middle-aged, as far as I can tell, and this might be their daily exercise, though I haven't seen them around before. Maybe I just wasn't looking; or they wait for days like these — overcast, cold — to hoof it.

When I was younger, and still made of stronger, leaner, more single-minded stuff, I walked a lot. I remember a friend and I drinking until the wee hours of the morning and thinking of where to sleep when we realized we didn't have any more money, so we decided to walk to their place, around seven kilometers away from where we were drinking. We made it, but the sun came up, so I walked back home immediately after. In heels. Drunk. Damn my feet. "Why," you say, "shouldn't you have sensible shoes, given that you walk a lot and drink and walk home?" Why, no. My fashion sense (oh, my god) had nothing to do with my odometer: These are as related to each other as dentistry is to a brick wall.

Though in fairness, whenever I end up drinking too much, I would take off my stilettos and walk home in my increasingly wet socks when the checkpoint gate at what used to be our house was closed to civilian traffic. (Well, in fairness to my feet, not to your imagination and by now zero respect for me.) I had to walk just one kilometer home, but even with no naturally unbalancing shoes on, I would totter like an idiot, crossing my legs inadvertently like an ostrich that never learned to pee, and stumble on home to my bed, socks puddling on the floor. Maybe it was adolescence, maybe it was waywardiness, maybe it was just time — the distances on foot involved in my youth were far larger in a day than what they are in my week now.

For now I'm usually sober (well, less drunk) and have no need to go anywhere since I drink at home, so I walk less. Even when I'm with my sister in the province, we just usually walk to the nearest bar, and park our asses, and in her case, sing hers off, there. Forgive the apparently callous phrase, but pandemic aside, I still walk less. I usually just spend my days working in the mornings, napping at noon, and then reading in the afternoon with the cat. Depression does a lot of things to me, and one very regrettable thing is to take away my hooves. 

I learned one thing, though: I now own more sensible shoes than I do high heels.