yellow shoes

eighty percent has never been the context for anything in my life. it has always been the threshold. the minimum viable requirement. the grade that still passes but never earns a commendation. i have gotten nothing i ever wanted because wanting, for me, has always required a hundred percent, and i have never trusted anything enough to grant it that. not people. not ideas. not even the weather forecast, which is why i carry an umbrella in july. my avoidant self leaves the twenty percent for the doubt, a buffer zone against the catastrophic failure of misplaced faith. i cannot trust anything wholeheartedly because wholeheartedness is, quite frankly, a statistical error waiting to happen. so eighty percent is my hundred percent. it is the ceiling i have built for myself, and i have furnished it nicely with books, solitude, and the quiet satisfaction of being right about most things.

then he said yellow shoes.

that is what he said to the pair of beige heels that i wore because i love plain things. i have nothing yellow in anything. my wardrobe operates on a four-colour theory that can be applied to every conceivable social situation: blue, black, grey, beige. these colours do not betray you. they do not announce your arrival. they do not suggest that you are someone who might enjoy a spontaneous road trip or, god forbid, karaoke. beige is the colour of strategic invisibility. it is the sartorial equivalent of saying, "please do not perceive me, and if you must, perceive me as someone who has their emotional affairs in order." my shoes were beige. i know this because i bought them from a sale rack in 2022, and they have never once been mistaken for anything else. but he looked at them in the dark of the cinema, casting everything into a sickly amber, and he said, "i really like your yellow shoes."

and i sat there, knees pressed together, hands folded in my lap like a victorian child at a seance, and i thought: what if they were yellow? what if i had, for one reckless moment, chosen the colour of sunshine and caution tape and the kind of optimism that makes me nauseous? what if i wanted to be seen as someone who wears yellow shoes? the theatre was dark. the contrast made it feel so. maybe that is what i wanted in my life as well. something that only looks yellow in the right light. something that becomes vibrant only when someone else decides to see it that way. i do not know if i want to be yellow. i do not know if i am capable of being yellow. but i know that when he said it, i did not correct him. i let the lie settle over me like a borrowed coat, and it fit better than i expected.

we were nine minutes late. this is important because i am the kind of person who arrives seventeen minutes early to everything, not out of punctuality but out of a pathological fear of being perceived as chaotic. nine minutes late meant we had circled the parking lot three times. he reversed the car with one hand behind my seat, a gesture so casually intimate that i nearly choked on my own saliva. his knuckles grazed the headrest, and i calculated the exact angle of his forearm and the thermodynamic probability of him touching my shoulder and the absolute certainty that i would spontaneously combust if he did. he did not touch my shoulder and i hated him for it.

he carried a jacket. this is also important. he carried a jacket because he knew the theatre would be cold, which is the kind of foresight that i usually attribute to people who have their lives together, and i have never once in my twenty-two years of existence remembered to bring a jacket anywhere. i run cold. i like being cold. i did not ask to borrow it. i did not say, "i am freezing, and you are warm, and this is a metaphor for everything i want but cannot articulate." i just sat there in my beige-not-yellow shoes and shivered in silence because asking for his jacket would have been an admission of need, and i do not admit to needing anything. needing is for people who have not yet learned that the universe does not keep a ledger of your unmet desires.

there are so many things i wanted to say. i wanted to tell him about the philosophical implications of the film's space-travel mechanics, how the narrative structure subverts the conventional aristotelian unities and gestures toward a nietzschean eternal recurrence where every choice is simultaneously a prison and a liberation. i wanted to discuss how the director's use of silence mirrors heidegger's concept of angst, that profound dread which arises not from fear of a specific object but from the sheer vertiginous awareness of one's own existence. i wanted to ask him if he believed in the multiverse and, if so, whether there was a version of this evening where i was brave enough to lean over and kiss him, and whether that version of me was happier or merely more reckless.

i wanted to ask him about his relationship with his parents because that is the only reliable predictor of how a man treats women, and i have done enough psychoanalysis to know that this is not a joke. i wanted to ask him if he had read judith butler and, if so, whether he understood that gender performativity means his casual masculinity is just as constructed as my careful femininity. i wanted to ask him about his position on the gaza strip, not because i wanted to start a political debate in a cinema, but because i needed to know if he was the kind of man who could hold complexity without defaulting to binary outrage. i wanted to ask him if he had ever read the unbearable lightness of being and whether he thought kundera was right about the unbearable weight of fidelity or whether he thought it was all just bourgeois navel-gazing. i wanted to ask him about his favourite taylor swift album because the tortured poets department is a masterpiece of narrative construction and i will die on that hill. i wanted to tell him about the time i saw a hamster in my garden and how i named it baudelaire because it looked like it was contemplating the abyss.

instead, i said nothing. i calculated the risk. i ran the probability. i decided that showing off my emotions would give him leverage to leave me with my heart all open and naked, and i have spent too many years cultivating emotional armour to discard it for a man who thinks beige is yellow.

i did not ask him about feminism, though i wanted to, because i needed to know if his politics were the kind that perform allyship while maintaining patriarchal comfort. i did not ask him about misandry, though i hold a small, private reservoir of it in my heart, a defensive mechanism against the accumulated disappointments of living in a world that consistently overvalues masculine mediocrity. i did not ask him if he thought the female orgasm was a political act, which is a question i have been dying to ask someone for years. not because i am particularly interested in his answer, let us be honest, most men's opinions on female pleasure are about as reliable as a weather forecast in a climate apocalypse, but because the question itself is a litmus test. it is the kind of question that separates the wheat from the chaff, the simone de beauvoir readers from the jordan peterson enthusiasts, the men who have actually located a clitoris on a map from the ones who still think it is a mythical creature like a unicorn or a competent tory government. i wanted to ask him because i needed to know if he would recoil, if he would laugh nervously, if he would launch into some performative feminist discourse about bodily autonomy and patriarchal control that he had memorised from an instagram slideshow. i did not ask him because i was afraid he would give the right answer, and then i would have no excuse to keep my walls up, and then i would have to actually confront the terrifying possibility that he might be good, and i do not know what to do with good.

i did not ask him any of this because i am a coward, and cowardice is just another word for self-preservation, and self-preservation is the only love i have ever truly known.

i do not drink. but that day i wanted a glass of wine. i wished the theatre would change their cinematic timeline and play jerry maguire, not because i like romantic comedies. i do not, they are formulaic and predictable and i have deconstructed all their tropes to the point of tedium, but because i wanted to watch him smile at every corny scene. i wanted to see if he was the kind of person who found earnestness endearing or embarrassing. i wanted to catalogue his reactions for later psychoanalysis. i wanted to dissect him the way i dissect everything, because that is how i understand the world. by taking it apart. by deciding whether it fits into my carefully organised taxonomy of acceptable things. i wanted to know if his smile reached his eyes or just his mouth, because i have read enough body language literature to know that the distinction matters. i wanted to know if he would laugh at the ridiculousness of the film or if he would take it seriously, because seriousness is often just the inability to admit that everything is absurd.

the urge to kiss him was overwhelming. the urge to not show that urge was stronger. i have never been good at showing emotions because vulnerability is cringe. it is awkward. it is the social equivalent of showing up to a black-tie event in pyjama pants. i would rather swallow my own teeth than let someone see the full, unedited version of what i am feeling. so i do what i always do. i shut up. i do not talk much. i stare at the screen and pretend to be deeply invested in the three-hour sci-fi movie that is decidedly not romantic at all.

what if i let myself be vulnerable and he leaves? what if i show him the full spectrum of my strange, obsessive, overanalytical self and he decides it is too much? what if i give him my hundred percent and he only gives me his eighty? what if my hundred percent is not enough? what if no one's hundred percent is ever enough? what if i am doomed to a lifetime of beige shoes and silent cinema dates and the quiet, gnawing certainty that i am too much and not enough in exactly equal measure?

i want to let an asshole regulate all my heart palpitations because his smile makes me forget how to calculate. i want to ask him about his favourite derrida essay and whether he thinks deconstruction is just intellectual nihilism disguised as rigour. i want to tell him that i have always thought of myself as a collection of defence mechanisms and not a person.

so i sat there in the dark, beige shoes that were suddenly yellow, and i did nothing. i said nothing. i did not kiss him. i did not tell him he was interesting. i did not ask him about his political affiliations or his favourite book or whether he believed that love was a construct or a biological imperative or a cosmic joke. i just sat there.

but my shoes were yellow. and i am infinitely falling for him.