The Night My Heels Made Me Feel Untouchable

Every closet hides a relic of a self we have already shed. Mine is a pair of strappy black stilettos, slightly scuffed at the toe, that I bought on a Tuesday in David Jones on Bourke Street when my life felt like it had slipped sideways. They were not the kind of shoe a sensible person buys. They were the kind a person buys because she needs to walk out of her own skin for a while.

The assistant folded them into a small black box and slid them across the counter without comment. In Australian dollars, the price was uncomfortable enough to make me wince, but I had reasoned my way into the purchase the way we all do when we are pretending to be brave. The Australian Consumer Law guarantees that what we buy should match what we are sold, but no statute ever accounted for shoes bought on the rebound from a feeling.

I carried them home on the tram, tucked under my arm like a parcel of dynamite, and I did not open the box until the night I had decided would belong to me. The night was a friend’s birthday, somewhere in South Yarra, and I had spent the previous afternoon getting ready with the seriousness of a bride. Hair pinned, lipstick chosen from a tube I had been saving, and then the shoes, last, because a heel is the punctuation at the end of a sentence.

The Pair That Waited In My Wardrobe

I had owned them for three weeks before I wore them out. They lived on the shelf above the handbags, next to a clutch I had not touched since university, and every morning I would glance up at them while I tied my flats. There is something about a high shoe that asks you to be a different kind of woman. It wants longer strides and a slower walk. It wants you to hold your shoulders like you have somewhere important to be.

I am five foot four on a generous day, and most of my life I have made peace with that. But there are nights when being short feels like a kind of apology, and you want, just once, to take up more of the room. The stilettos added nearly nine centimetres and a posture I had forgotten I owned. They were not comfortable. They were not meant to be. They were a costume, and the show was mine.

Stepping Out In Melbourne

The birthday dinner was at a little place off Chapel Street where the wine list is long and the tables are close enough that strangers become accomplices for the evening. I caught the 96 tram from my apartment, holding the rail with one hand and the hem of my dress with the other, and I did not mind that a man in hi-vis work boots gave me a tired smile as if to say, you have got this. By the time I stepped off near the restaurant, my calves were already complaining.

Melbourne rewards effort. The city rewards the woman who has taken the time to put herself together and walked out anyway, even when the night is humid and the forecast lied about the rain. Inside, my friend threw her arms around me and said, look at you, and I realised that the shoes had already done half the work. The other half, the smile that came easier and the way my laugh landed lower in my chest, that was something I had forgotten I could reach for.

The Hour Everything Shifted

There is a particular hour, usually between the main course and the cake, when a dinner with friends stops being polite and starts being honest. The wine has done what wine does, and the music has shifted, and somebody has pulled their chair around so the circle is tighter. That hour is when I stopped thinking about the shoes at all. I was simply in them.

A man I had never met asked me to dance in the corner of the room that had been cleared for dancing, and I said yes without checking with myself first. The song was something I did not know, which was a relief, because then I had no choreography to remember. The heels held me like a sentence holds its subject. I did not wobble. I did not apologise for taking up space. I closed my eyes and the room became a smaller, kinder place.

What Power Actually Looks Like In A Pair Of Straps

For a long time I thought power was a matter of volume. Of being the loudest in the room, or the first to the bar, or the one with the sharpest comeback. The night I danced in those stilettos taught me that power is quieter than that. Power is the willingness to be looked at. Power is walking into a room in Melbourne and not shrinking. Power is choosing a nine centimetre heel on a tram and arriving anyway.

I bought those shoes in a department store with a returns policy that would have welcomed me back the next morning if I had changed my mind. Under the Australian Consumer Law, I would have been within my rights to return them if they had been defective or did not match the description. But the shoes were exactly as promised. The only thing they did not promise was that I would feel, for one shimmering hour, like the version of myself I had been waiting to introduce to the world.

Where Those Heels Live Now

They sit in the back of the wardrobe now, behind a row of boots I wear to write in cafes. I take them out sometimes, when I am folding a blanket or looking for a lost earring, and I hold them for a moment the way you hold a letter from someone you used to be. They are still beautiful. They are still slightly too high. They are not mine anymore in the way they were that night.

I think about that sometimes, how a pair of shoes can be a portal. How one night, in a dress and a borrowed lipstick and a pair of black stilettos, I walked into a room and became the woman I wanted to be.

If you have ever felt that same flicker, that one hour of being exactly who you meant to be, I would love to hear about it. There is a corner of this little site where stories like ours go to live, and the door is open. Tell me about your shoes, your night, the song that played. Or, if your story is of a different shape, you might recognise yourself in this reflection on intimacy. Whatever you carry, whatever you wore, send it my way through the submissions page. Every woman deserves a night she remembers by the shoes.