Got Shoes?
My name is Alex, and I am a shoeaholic.
Not that this should have come as any surprise to me, or to anyone related to me, or anyone who has ever met me, for that matter. But this weekend, when the sun decided to finally come out, I wanted to wear the new Prada sandals that I had clearly overoptimistically bought way back in March when the first of the spring merch was hitting the stores. So I ventured into the closet in my bedroom to look for them. Now, for anyone who has ever lived in a tiny apartment in New York, or London, or any other overheated housing market, you know this isn’t some fancy walk-in closet. (In fact, I once had such problems finding an apartment with suitable storage space in London that I had to upgrade to a tiny two-bedroom: one for me, one for my wardrobe. That was a beautiful thing. If a financially stupid one.)
In any case, my closet is about ten feet high, four feet deep and four feet wide, and every square inch is fully crammed with clothing and shoeboxes. I realize that a trip to the Container Store might have made for more efficient storage of those shoes, but I once lived through the nightmare of coming home one day and seeing a trail of water coming from my closet. Something had leaked from the apartment upstairs… You can only imagine the psychic trauma of that day. The horror, the horror! So long story short, no, I will never get rid of my shoeboxes. But I digress.
The shoe boxes are piled up, and they have started to obstruct my access to the clothes hanging on the rods behind them. In fact, one Bergdorf Goodman shoe sale more, and I won’t be able to see over them. I dread ever cleaning out this closet, even though there are always those Eureka! moments when I rediscover a beautiful pair of sandals or mules that I had bought oh, maybe six months — or let’s be honest, six years — before, and had simply never gotten around to wearing. And maybe at that point I’d actually even have something to wear with them.
This time, I had a few too many of those moments. So that’s where those precious beige leather-and-snakeskin Christian Louboutin peep-toe slingbacks were! Reunited, and it feels so good… And the peach satin Gucci slides with the gold bamboo heels, from last summer. And the navy and cream toile-print espadrilles I’d bought in Seattle in 2003. Damn, those would have been in style last summer. After a good thirty minutes of cooing and sighing over my virgin footwear, I realized I was trapped in the middle of a mountain range of shoeboxes, and I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner across town in ten minutes.
Needless to say, I never threw out anything — and I never found those Pradas. I settled for these crocodile thongs instead. I just knew I had a pair like this!
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