Gift voucher

On a day like today, eons ago, the Kings brought me some very precious Wedge Walls sneakers that I had ordered months ago, aware that they were bordering on prohibitive for my pages. In the meantime, my foot must have grown and, when I jerked them on to go out to the bumper cars with my friends, I kept quiet that they were very fair, little bolt in that, in two donations, I tamed them. Innocent. They killed me so much that, that afternoon, on my way home, I had to confess to the crime and bear the consequences in front of my mother’s stern nose. I must say it was classy. Not one voice louder than another. The next day he bought me some La Bellota sneakers at the neighborhood shoe store sales, he put the Walls in the washing machine, put them in his box, took them up to the attic and there they stayed with their bodies, waiting for my sister to grow up to inherit them.

Today the Kings have come to the houses where they could, which are not all. The containers of the good, regular and poor neighborhoods without euphemisms are overflowing with boxes and bags of more or less expensive rubbish bought at the last minute in bulk to cover the file and that, tomorrow, will be exchanged for other more convenient bullshit. What is neither bought, nor sold nor exchanged is the illusion that those Walls made me that I could not enjoy because I was stubborn. It is not nostalgia for the past. Nor romanticization of poverty. Neither red nor brown chochez. It may be, I admit, longing for yourself when you wanted something so badly that you risk losing it just to try it. The Kings of adults have it more difficult. Many times what you yearn for cannot be brought to you and what they bring you cannot be exchanged for whatever you want, no matter how much gift voucher they staple to the label. When the Walls finally served my sister, my mother’s daughter said she didn’t even want them as gifts. It does not surprise me. I have googled them to verify that they existed. They were awful.