She stood still

She stood still, halfway through a block and walked in place, heavily, so that her shoes scuffed violently on the pavement. She trudged onward, not through space but through the soles of her shoes. The action of rubbing and eroding became tearing and severing. She swung her arms in the same motions she allowed them to make whilst walking and bend her neck and head forward. The soles, already loose, began to catch and wrap around to the outside of the shoe with some steps. She ground the remaining tethers back to the shoes against the pavement in a back and forth raking movement until both soles were completely detached from her shoes. She picked them up, rolled them into flat wads, and placed them in her hip pocket. Her toes, bound together behind thin fabric, curled directly onto the ground. She clutched at the pavement by arching her feet. The bases of the shoes lifted away but did not flex and remained horizontal above the ground. She could begin to erode her feet, legs, her hair would drag behind her, she would hobble on her knees until they were gone and she would crawl the rest of the way, until the posterior horizon was no longer the sea. She had compressed days of ginger steps that needed to carry her further, into one spot. Hurriedly you have forced a process that should have consumed more time, more distance. You cannot put behind you the open doors, the interrupted routines, the shoes resting at odd angles on thresholds, the ocean breezes, by physically erasing them, destroying the artifacts, wearing through the papers in your pocket. With distance these things will fall away on their own, as you fall away. You cannot accelerate the sun, the arrival of night, sleep, unmade beds and cold open windows. You cannot accelerate loss or forgetting.