white adidas sambas

A year ago, I needed a pair of white Adidas Sambas. Needed them in the way a starving body needs salt, in the way a parched throat needs water, in the way I have never needed an ex-boyfriend to own up to his fixation on pixelated fantasies. Needed them more than I needed my mother to look at me and say thank you, more than I needed her to acknowledge that I had been watching over her since I was eight. It was a need beyond language, beyond reason, beyond rational thought, beyond the limits of what a person should be willing to suffer for a pair of shoes.

I had the black ones. The brown ones too. But the white ones—God, the white ones—I couldn’t explain it to anyone, and I wouldn’t try. If I didn’t get them, I would spiral into the abyss of all the things I had been denied, all the moments of longing that had nowhere to fall back on. They weren’t just shoes; they were a bargaining chip. Of what, I didn’t know. That I could have something I wanted? That I could force something into existence through sheer will? That I could make something fit, even if it wasn’t supposed to?

I walked into the store, asked the worker if they had my size. She looked at me with that polite retail expression, half apology, half indifference. No, they didn’t.

A normal person would have accepted this. Walked out, gone home, ordered them online.

My mind would have punished me if I failed to walk away with the white Adidas sambas.

I let the question slide from my lips like something half-formed, half-prepared: Can you check if you have them in kids' sizes? She hesitated, then disappeared into the back.

Minutes later, she returned, a box in her hands. I felt something shift inside me, something old and relentless, something that had twined itself around my throat. A possibility. A chance. She handed me the box, and I opened it like it held salvation, like it might undo the thick weight of disappointment that had settled into the iris of my eyes.

And then: impossibility. The shoes were too small.

I exhaled, slow, bracing myself for the familiar pang of loss. But I slipped my foot in anyway, and—

By God, they fit.

Tight, constricting, suffocating, but they fit.

Cinderella, if Cinderella had been raised in Los Angeles and knew that shoes wouldn’t save her. If she understood that even when the slipper fits, it doesn’t mean the story ends in love.

I grinned, bigger than I had in a long time, wider than the first time I realized that disappointment no longer had its arms wrapped around my neck. A relief, heavy yet lighter than the baggy jeans I had clung to for years.

The next day, I wore them. Stepped outside, let the sun glance off the white leather, felt—at first—like I had won something, like I had cheated the system.

Then, a pang in my toes, sharp and insistent. Another step. Another pang. A creeping awareness: when I tried them on the night before, they had hurt.

But what’s a little pain?

I have felt worse. Worse in ways that don’t soften with time. I know how to carry discomfort, how to tuck it away until it becomes something else, discipline, endurance, a quiet kind of triumph. I know how to walk with pain. I have done it my whole life.

The shoes bit at me, sunk their sharp jaws into the flesh of my heels, dug into my toes like they wanted to become part of me. The pain was instant, then persistent, then rhythmic. It had a pulse. I could hear it throb in my skull as I walked. I convinced myself I could make it stop if I just ignored it long enough. I told myself I would wear them every day for the next week. Walk through the ache, let the leather mold to me, let the pain fold itself into something tolerable. By the time classes resumed, I’d be fine. I wouldn’t have to think about the sting with every step.

It was a matter of time. It always is.

But time didn’t change anything.

Days passed, yet the sharp sting at the tip of my toes did not. The shoes remained unyielding, merciless in their design. The pain failed to belong to something tolerable, it became the slave of permanence.

Every night, I peeled them off like a second skin, the blood seeping through my socks, scabbed-over wounds lining, sewing into the backs of my ankles. The raw, wet ache of flesh rubbed down to nothing. The sting when I stepped onto a cold tile, barefoot, my skin flayed open by the thing I had insisted on keeping.

My mother noticed. She saw the way I walked, the subtle wince I tried to hide. She offered, gently, to take them back to the store, to exchange them for a bigger size.

I felt degraded.

Did she think this little of me? That I would crumble at the first sign of anguish? That I would let a pair of shoes defeat me?

Did she forget I was the little girl who had firsthand experience with the hell she calls home? Did she think I would flinch at something as small as this?

If I had once needed the white Sambas, now they needed me. The shoes, as if they were something more than stitched leather and rubber soles, had become a test. A test of endurance, of will, of my capacity to withstand pain.

And I would pass.

I didn’t pass.

The shoes never softened, never conformed. They remained as rigid as the day I bought them, unrelenting in their quiet cruelty.

And yet, I never got rid of them.

To this day, every time I slip them on, I hear the faint murmur of the masochist in my head—patient, insidious, familiar. A voice that does not reprimand but reminds:

If you cannot withstand the discomfort of shoes, you will fail at every sign of despair.

And I listen.

I have no shame in admitting the distorted relationship I have with something as mundane, as useless, as a pair of shoes I already own in different colors. I need my stubbornness to manifest somewhere, to have an outlet, to be projected onto minuscule occurrences, onto too-tight shoes, onto the unnecessary refusal to return them, onto the silent pact I made with myself to endure. Because if I don’t, if I let this relentlessness go unchecked, I will walk through life expecting real suffering to be a test of my endurance. I will mistake unnecessary hardship for fate. Mistake needless pain for proof of my resilience.

And I cannot afford to do that.

I cannot keep placing myself in harm’s way, walking willingly into dangerous situations, just to prove, to the world, to myself, that resilience is fused into my being. That I am unbreakable. That nothing, no matter how sharp, how cruel, how unforgiving, can wear me down. I thrive on looking at myself in the mirror, seeing the self-restraint in my eyes.

They never talk about this.

They never tell you that the second you come out the other end, once you’ve survived the thing you were never meant to survive, you will have to live with the void it leaves behind. A grueling ghost of a past, not quite yours, but one that chains itself onto you anyway. A fragment of pain carried by someone else, traced into your hands as if it had always belonged to you.

A void where once there was true despair, true fear, not something imagined, not something imposed by the will of external forces, but something real, something inescapable. And out of fear that you’ll lose the threads of the survivor, you test it. You probe at it. You make sure it is still there, still breathing, still alive and well.

Because if you aren’t fighting, if you aren’t enduring, then what are you?

Who are you, without the struggle?

I don’t fucking know.

But at least, at least, I look good in my white Adidas sambas.