Wandering

It seems that just as my youngest sister has a certain reputation for being in comprehensibly hard on her shoes I have a similar knack for my shoes meeting horribly disastrous ends, usually unbeknownst to me.
As far as my sister goes, I would say that it could not be entirely blamed on her, given the fact that for years she was mostly wearing hand-me-downs from Sabry or me.  These shoes would end up on her feet, usually still in relatively good condition, and be barely hanging on to their last threads of life within a few months.  However, considering that she overtook my shoe size several years ago and then flew past Sabry within the past year and a half, it seems that had those shoes in her childhood been brand new the results would've been much the same.  I'm not sure what she does to her shoes...but, then, I'm not sure what happens to mine either.
As I said, my shoes are doomed from the moment I pulled them out of the box.  It doesn't matter how hard I try to keep them in pristine condition, they always meet with horrible ends.  Almost all of my shoes have scuffs and scrapes, cuts and scars and I can't tell you where most of them came from.  Most of my shoes look more like they went into battle than just to the supermarket.
One summer I had a beautiful pair of blue leather ballet flats that I wore with almost everything, despite how they hurt my feet.  I took excellent care of them, always making sure to stuff them gently away in my closet when I was done with them for the day, but it was in vain.  The poor blue leather shoes died sometime last summer.  Their last days were spent withered, misshapen, and caked in a bright red mud that I'm sure I never wore them near.
Currently, my favorite pair of shoes is an old pair of green Toms.  These poor things have not died yet, but that's just because I won't let them.  They really met their end the day that they were peacefully minding their own business on the stairs and were suddenly out in the yard having their soles ripped out. Since then they've huddled in my closet, only to be worn when I am most desperate for them and even so they've managed to have their soles torn out a second time as well as develop two great holes where my toe is.  And yet, I still find things to wear them with because I simply refuse to acknowledge their defeat.
Almost none of my shoes have any sort of memories etched into their scars, most of them just appear out of nowhere while I'm dragging my feet with my head far away in the clouds.  But some of them have memories that jump out at me from those scars whenever I glance down at my feet.  I occasionally find myself trying to sort out how it all happens.  Sometimes I even decide that the scraps and scuffs are just "part of the job."  My shoes are there to protect my feet from getting roughed up so they're really just getting they signed up for, though this never makes me feel much better.
Sometimes I decide that these are just the remains of another life my shoes are living where they really are great heroes going off to battle and coming home with lots of stories that I'll never hear...and this usually just makes me feel foolish.
But usually, I just settle for deciding that all the scuffs and scars and scrapes and things are just the result of my active mind, who is really the one running off on adventures as I wander from class to class and not my shoes.

Kate