If you had asked me why my wearer kept running after that train he knew he would never catch, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I knew there was someone on that train, someone who had pulled him close and stood on their tiptoes to kiss the top of his forehead. She was a someone to him, but she was just another set of feet to me. Just a person with feet, wearing shoes, on a train he would never, ever reach. I couldn’t tell you why he wore me out for something as pointless as a connection. I couldn’t tell you until he was late for work one day and tossed something over me, a desperate attempt at being “hip” in the form of an accessory: a hat.

Everyone knows clothes can’t speak for themselves, no matter how much spirit and energy is contained in them. We are ghosts of another time, the spirit of past wearers, makers, or just lost souls needing to manifest. I don’t remember any of my past life, just the life of the Man whose steps I am bound to follow. I could never be sentient, but Hat and I didn’t have to be in order to feel.

Maybe they were a past lover of mine, maybe it was a compatible energy, but it was undoubtedly something. I only knew of love when the Man had had a someone. Hat wasn’t a “one” more than they were a “thing,” but, to me, they were the only one and the only thing that mattered in that moment. The suede of their figure clung to my hardened exterior, softening the shell I tried to exist under everyday. The scratch of their fabric against the smooth of my outside seemed to whisper:

“I think I am here for a reason. It’s easy to be a dormant accessory, tossed aside when you aren’t really working for the person’s outfit. It’s easy to be silent and complacent when they don’t need you on a warm summer day. It’s not easy to stay quiet when everything about you feels found, despite being discarded. Could it be that next to you is where I am supposed to be?”

I wanted to shout. I wanted to declare. But the soft, malleable folds of their fabric spoke in a way I could not. No matter how hard I tried, the indestructible, flat soles I was built on couldn’t tap out what I was trying to say. The only aspect of myself I could control was the very edge of a shoelace rubbing against Hat, cooing:

“Found. You. Home. Found. You. You. Love. You.” Maybe it was too forward, but, nonetheless, their eloquent pattern responded:

“Oh, good. I am not alone. I think this was some twist of fate, but it could just be that I have spent a lot of time among the clouds, fantasizing. It doesn’t seem likely that we will be tossed in this configuration again for a while. I will drink it in for now. When we are separated, I will call to you from the top of the Man. It gets tiring looking over all from above, it will be nice to focus on something that I want to further understand. That something being love, of course, because I don’t know anything, but I hold the simplest of things in my thoughts. Our love is among those, but there is so much more to understand about it.”

Their speech rose and fell in waves, coursing through my being as I scratched, “Don’t. Know. But. Love. You. Found. Found. Love. Found,” I prayed they understood, only having a gentle caress of their fabric adjusting to go off of. We didn’t need to speak to feel warmed by each other’s souls, the buzz of fate and luck radiating through the air. It was something that wasn’t supposed to happen, but did, and that was what made it sweeter.

We lie in that dark closet, soaking each other in and feeding off our collective energies. Our essences were figuratively twirling, entwined until a sliver of light shot everything back into reality, and, ironically, threw us in the dark as we now had to navigate our relationship on differing ends of the world. With two sides of man between us, we stole glances. I could feel their focus on me as my shoelaces bounced and drifted through time, reaching to them. The tip of Hat pointed ever so slightly downward and the Man had to keep adjusting the cap to the top of his head. They knew I still gazed longingly though, not with my eyes, but with a heart that lives on.

We did this for a week. Calling to each other in coffee lines, only relying on the faith and trust that our focus had not drifted on busy sidewalks. I hadn’t noticed the holes that were forming at the tips of my figure, or the width of the Man’s feet pushing at my seams. It didn’t occur to me that I could be without the Man, for he had loved me too. When I was placed in a box rather than his feet, though, my thoughts reflected the darkness of the container in the sense that both harbored the unknown.

Through pleasantries and polite conversation, I discovered that I was being donated to a Lost and Found. It was quite noble of the Man to not toss me to a trash can, but I had only just begun to understand needing a something, a someone when they were being ripped away from me. As I lie, piled onto many other shoes just like me, I started to understand the Man as he ran after that train more. It wasn’t anything rational, it wasn’t anything that upset the Man about where he was in life, it was just that he loved. He loved with the same conviction that even a shoe and a hat could, and his instincts were to chase after it, to find it again even if he knew it was disappearing. I had no choice other than to just reminisce in the dark storage room, a part of something that suggested I had been lost before I was found when, really, I had been found and now I was lost.