Simone Weil 46

No one will remember the shoe, a friend writes, the one soaked in Orlando's blood. History's obscurities rhyme, that shoe with the abandoned shoe on a Paris street. I associate terror with shoes. On the trail yesterday, a man held two soles in his hand near the waterfall. But that was only a walk in the woods. My girl shed her shoes, walked barefoot in the pool beneath the falls. “I love you, babe,” the shooter texted his wife. Men in the bathroom stall saw his boots pace beneath the door. My first word was “shoes,” though it might have been “Sooze.” “Hey, babe,” my son says to his girlfriend. He got new shoes; the last pair were just for looks, it seems. One cat cuddles with my daughter's cleats. Memory is inventory before it assigns affect to object. We live in a state where you take your shoes off before you walk in.