What I wore when I walked out of a hard conversation

There is a particular kind of silence that arrives before a conversation breaks open. I remember it the way you remember a smell: warm bread, wet leaves, the inside of a handbag you have not opened in years. On a Tuesday in late summer, I was sitting at my sister's kitchen table in Newtown, and the silence had been there longer than either of us.

The kettle clicked off. She said something about a friend, and I felt my shoulders climb toward my ears. My jaw was doing that thing it does when it is preparing to defend a person who is not in the room. She looked at me over the rim of her cup. I looked at my feet.

I had been wearing a pair of broken-in taupe sandals, the soft leather kind that wraps twice around the ankle. They were the shoes I put on when I knew I would be walking for a while. I had bought them on a clearance rack near Parramatta the year I turned thirty and swore off uncomfortable shoes for good.

Some people leave conversations by opening their mouths and letting the wrong thing fall out. I leave them by lacing up.

The pair on my feet

Those sandals were the colour of a flat white gone cold: not exactly beige, not exactly grey, and entirely too forgiving. The soles had been worn smooth from years of pacing the footpath past my place in Surry Hills, past the laundromat that plays the same three songs on rotation, past the cafe with the best avo toast in the suburb.

I keep telling people I cannot afford new shoes, which is a polite lie I tell myself so I do not have to admit I am attached to objects the way other people are attached to pets. The taupe sandals had been through enough. A coastal walk from Coogee to Bondi in the wrong weather. A dinner in Fitzroy where I spilled pinot on the strap and pretended it was red sauce. They had seen things.

That afternoon, my sister asked about a friend, and I knew, before she finished the sentence, that I was not going to answer. Not because I had nothing to say, but because the answer would require me to admit something I had spent six months pretending was not happening.

The kitchen, the kettle, the unspoken

There is a phrase in the archive about the conversations we run from rather than finish. I have written about it before, in a piece called sleeping with the enemy, and the truth is I have been the enemy more often than I have been the one doing the sleeping. The enemy, in my case, is usually my own refusal to be honest in real time.

My sister and I were drinking tea meant to be calming. A candle smelled like fig and something woody. Outside, a neighbour was hosing down a driveway in that uniquely Australian way that makes you feel simultaneously judgemental and grateful for the rain that never quite came that week. I kept glancing at the door.

She asked a direct question. I felt the strap of my sandal press into the back of my heel in the way it does when you have been sitting too long, and I took it as a sign.

The moment the laces went on

I stood up the way you stand up when you are trying to make the standing up look casual, the way you pick up your phone at a party so no one asks you to dance. I said something like "I just need to grab something from the car" and walked out of the room before she could ask me what.

In the hallway I sat on her son's school bag and tightened the second strap. The leather was warm from my skin. There was a chip in the heel from a Melbourne weekend, when I had taken the tram to Acland Street because someone told me the cake shop was worth the trip and I needed cake, the way you need cake when you have just realised you are not who you were pretending to be. The chip was a souvenir of a different kind of running away.

I went back inside, kissed her on the head, and walked out the door. She did not chase me. She never does. She is, the way older sisters often are, fluent in my exits.

Bondi in the late arvo light

I did not have a destination, but my feet did. They took me past the public school where kids were practising cricket in the nets, past the bottle-o with the handwritten sign about lottery tickets, past the Italian grocer who gives me a free basil sprig because she says I have honest eyes. I ended up, the way you always end up in Sydney when you do not know where you are going, at the coast.

It was the kind of late-arvo light Bondi gets in February, when the sky turns a colour I will call apricot even though nobody else would. The ice cream queue was twenty-deep. A man was playing didgeridoo for coins. Two teenagers were arguing about whether a Curlewis pie beat a Campbell Parade pie, the kind of argument that only matters when you have been walking for forty minutes in the wrong shoes.

I sat on the low wall by the pool and watched the salt spray catch the light. I thought about my sister, and the question I had not answered, and the fact that the sandals had not given me a single blister across three suburbs.

The text I did not send

My sister texted me that night. "Where did you go?" she wrote. I typed three different replies and deleted them all. One said too much. One said too little. One said "I am at the dog beach watching a kelpie argue with a labrador," which was technically true and spiritually a dodge.

I stared at the cursor for a long time, then put the phone face down and went to brush my teeth. The taupe sandals were still by the front door where I had left them. I had switched to thongs the second I stepped inside, the way any reasonable Australian does at the threshold, and forgotten to put the sandals back.

What the shoes carried me toward

There is a piece in the archive, the art of eight, about the eight things you only learn to say once you have left the room. I think about it often, about the way the body knows the answer before the mouth does, the way your hand finds the strap of a sandal before your brain has finished the sentence you are about to avoid.

I learned something that afternoon that I have since learned a hundred more times: the shoes you wear when you run from a conversation are usually the most honest thing in the room. They know the truth before you do. They have already started walking toward it.

I have not yet answered my sister. The sandals are still by the door. I will lace them up when I am ready, which is a polite way of admitting I am not, and that the only thing worse than running from a conversation is finally sitting back down and saying the words out loud, to a person who knows exactly what you have been avoiding. Until then, the taupe sandals will sit there, patient as a sister, ready to carry me out of whatever I am not yet brave enough to say.

If you have a pair of shoes that has ever carried you out of a hard conversation, the inbox is open. Send the story, the suburb, the season, and the question you never answered. It might just end up in a future post on the blog.