Trail Shoes

Note:

Wix you dirty old friend. Your UX still confounds me. I wrote the first draft of the post below for a Community Education Writing Class I took in January at Portland Community College. It describes the path not taken, what life would have looked like had Brad stayed in Central Asia. The assignment was to focus on an article of clothing. Over the past few days I have decided that the way Brad feels in Central Asia could be analogous to my life in Portland during Covidtimes.

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Brad hopped into the mashrutka in front of the theater and handed the driver a coin. For the equivalent of 25 cents he could get pretty much anywhere in the city, a fact for which he was grateful since he had taken a significant pay cut to live in this far flung corner of the world. As the twenty year old Sprinter chugged slowly by the Lenin statue and mural of the eagle soaring over a yurt he felt a tinge of homesickness for the multi-ethnic food carts he’d find in the city center back home. It had been almost a year to the day since he had left with a carry-on backpack and a one way ticket to Asia.

He knew the moment he stepped out of the shared taxi about three months into his trip that he liked this town. The fresh fruits and vegetables in the bazaar were familiar but the circular breads and plethora of homemade household goods seemed emblematic of a bygone era. The women walking around in headscarves and metal teeth and the older men who he played chess with in the park before work seemed enchanted to meet an actual American. Though he had only managed to visit the rugged snowcapped peaks in the distance a handful of times, they called his name every morning from his bedroom window. He was even beginning to appreciate the harsh taste of home made vodka and the dried fermented cheese pellets that resembled tiny jawbreakers.

Brad first realized how long he had been away when he tied his shoes that morning. These were the Nike trail runners he bought in Beaverton, on one of his visits to the Employee store before handing in his badge. They seemed much more durable than all the special edition sneakers with the names of basketball icons he had left in a storage locker. These trail shoes were on their last legs though; the soles were a sliver of their original thickness and now slightly treacherous on the melting ice.

He got out of the mashrutka and turned right, up the hill towards the flat he shared with another westerner and two English speaking locals. A flotilla of plastic bottles and Twix wrappers rushed by in the opposite direction in the brown, swollen channel that did double duty as an irrigation canal and a gutter. He hadn’t intended to stay in this city as long as he had but once he found the job teaching English he had little reason to leave.

He climbed up the open stairway to the ninth floor of the Brezhnev era concrete structure he called home when suddenly his foot came out from under him. As Brad landed on his palms, images of the life he’d left behind flooded in. There was the ski trip he’d taken just before leaving with his college buddies - a few of them on the cusp of parenthood - and the family reunion a few months before with all his cousins, aunts, and uncles where he announced to his parents his plan to break free of the company laptop he’d spent the past few years tethered to. Then, for a fleeting moment, his ex, appearing much more faintly than before but definitely still with him.

As he pushed himself back up to his feet Brad admitted to himself it was time to visit the bazaar to try to get the best possible deal on a new pair of shoes from the women with the metal teeth. He was frustrated that his local language skills were not good enough to challenge the women on their claims about the authenticity of the swoosh clad products they sold. He had been so proud when he learned his last name in Cyrillic. He was beginning to realize that no matter how much he liked it here he would never fully fit in. Maybe he was finally ready to return with his backpack.