Rosie Today

From the desert, I broke my tabi heels. My old family gathered in a spacious ring of folding chairs surrounding a barren fire pit, when suddenly, a large crunch rippled through the dry air of our campsite. I look down at my feet, my ankles bent at a precarious angle. The hallowed mahogany wedge of the boot split clean at the heel, a sudden snapping of wood like brittle bones. Staring down at my ankles, still bent, a clean slit separating what once was a beautiful shoe. The white paper-striated tabi boot lies folded against the ground, dirtied with desert sand.

Before the incident, I was sitting with Papa at the countertop of an old hut, not unlike the beehive desert huts of Star Wars. We were eating our porridge, behaving. It was familiar. And my mood was not particularly affected.

After my wedge heel cracked from my tabi boot, it was not fully separated, just dangling on by a thread of hope as I dredged the treacherous desert march back to our town. My family was far ahead; I was left behind, slowly hobbling on my broken boots. 

On the path back to town, I see the biggest butterflies that I have ever seen. They had black, bat-like bodies and large, colorful, expanding wings that had a black outermost layer and four rainbow layers inside: magenta, blue, orange, and green.  From a distance, the creatures looked beautiful and magnificent. Up close, their faces were scary. Much more like pterodactyls than a beautiful butterfly. Along the lonesome path, the prehistoric butterfly was stationed, feasting on a bloody victim. 

As I walked in between stations of terrifying, beautiful predators, I had a GUT feeling that my fate was saved; these butterflies wouldn’t hurt me. Rather, they were my protectors, disguised as terrible creatures, though indisputably, they were my fearless teachers. To be a predator and feast on the blood. You can still save your pretty face. 

Life of pain rewinding before my eyes, I am back in Bolivia, streets eroding yet never fully built. 

When the no-man’s land dirt roads eventually formed into a barbed wire fence protecting uncared-for paneled homes, the path diverges. I go left and lose the destination, a slight panic forming in my chest when it occurs to me that I have lost my family. They walked so far in front, never looking back to see if I was still with them, though it didn’t take long for me to correct my error and find a new home. 

Home was found in my beautiful friend, Cam Rose, who now replaced my folks in the dream. We found a house and took care of one another inside it. Despite being in some Jungian alternate reality desert, which I subconsciously associate with Bolivia, once I was in the safety of seclusion with Cam Rose, I was back in the modern world, comfortably venting about the day I had spent at a primordial wasteland of my own making, in the spacey company of the ghosts of my past. 

In my lamentation of the day, I find myself rejecting the criticism that I shouldn’t have worn Margiela Tabis to the desert because they were already worn, irrelevant second-hand designer boots from Depop. 

My shoes, bags, and jewelry are designer, though I am still deep in the Desert. Far from home, detached from reality. Relationships broken beyond repair, like the wedge of an old shoe, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Mirrored friendship bandages a starving inherited wound. Deep in denial, I deserted my past.