Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I found a pair of red shoes in a shop in Melbourne.

It was a long time ago. It was a seconds shop. I brought them home not liking them much, grew to love them more than any shoes I’d ever had, wore them out. When they broke I wasn’t too perturbed. Shoes aren’t so difficult to replace. But I couldn’t ever find a replacement for them. I looked around. I found myself in Melbourne, went back to the shop. It was gone. A year after that I began looking regularly in the second hand shops, but they never appeared there. Every week for nine months I looked for them. A few years after that I realized how much I missed those shoes. Every time I went to another country I would go to shoe shops I passed, hoping that there would be a shoe like my shoe. Germany, France, Amsterdam, America, Australia, Thailand, Vietnam. I realized that my shoe shopping habits had changed. If I needed a shoe I bought one. But never did I find another pair of shoes that I MUST have.

I would go out to the shops thinking: there is this shoe I want. I could spend hours looking, never really wanting anything. Then I realized that a great thing had happened. Finally I had found something that was worth waiting for. Finally, I knew what it felt like.