Boots

These new boots are like having my legs strapped up. They feel tight and structural as if I am wearing ice skates, or big walking boots and am off on a locomotary adventure. They are leather and have shiny bits and a hard heel that thuds loud as I walk on the carpet down the corridors at work. They echo significantly through the cavern of Central Station, and I feel like I am this echo of my boot on the hard stone floor. I am decisive, I am weather proof, I am good with skirts or pants.

I am transported back to my early years where an iconic costume piece could propel you happily through days, be a talisman, act as a defining feature of your persona. When you are very little and insisting to adults. In supermarkets trailing some flight of fancy made solid in prop. When you are older, but young compared to now, and you create new flights of fancy, try on new characters. You get your fairytale in sync with other peoples' and soundtrack it, and pick suitable venues to play it out in. Red gum boots. Mums old rope petticoat which comes to your ankles. Gloves and a bow tie. Velvet red riding hood dress with matching muff. Favourite brown cord pants. Fairy skirt. Denim jacket. Glitter nail polish. A side ponytail. That rara skirt. Those army boots. That piece of netting. It becomes almost entirely irrelevant what it looks like, it's the feeling it conjures which is important. The thing is just the magic of association, of transformation. Dress ups.

These boots summon up for me defiant European women who are harshly glamorous with Baltic cheekbones and icy skin, with wounded hearts but fabulous coats, with coiffed hair and words that can be spat across doorways of cafes in the cold late afternoon to the retreating backs of cold men.

These boots are spacey and me piloting some ship, 'yes captain, we'll lower her down as soon as we got a clear landing this side of the moons'. They are sensible and not to be messed with. They are secure, resilient and confident - everything held firm and secure, all worst outcomes planned for, contingencies accounted for.

They are horse-like, my version of hooves. My childhood fantasy of being a horse - galloping, whinnying, free.

They are slightly stern like a winter dressed teacher who now has extra height and looms down from above. They are like boarding school in another age - woollen tights and mittens and boots to wear as we drift in a row over the snow lined fields towards chapel.

They are sex about to happen in the afternoon on someone’s couch, and the strange dance to get there beforehand. They are being silly in boots, rock star hair, a borrowed v-neck jumper, a silly hat and a tub of ice cream.

Not that you'd know any of these secret tales just by looking at such plain black footwear, dime a dozen, quiet to look at; but I can feel them. These stories throb in me like blood under skin.