Throwing Your Manolos

“You’re a young, pretty girl with pretty pink shoes. Now stand up and be strong!” Those are Funny words to come from forty-year old truck driver with a mullet in a gas station at midnight. Even funnier is how I happened to meet him. And perhaps, the funniest part of all is the pretty pink shoes.
Maybe he knew it maybe he didn’t, but sometimes I felt like Candies when I wanted to be Manolos. Earlier that night I was girl, pure girl: tearing apart my room searching for the perfect shirt, the perfect shoes, the perfect earrings. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Earlier that week I was everyone’s girl, doing every favor, writing every story, answering every phone call. Everything. Everything. Everything. And then, at the zenith of my tension I met a man without a soul on my way to New Haven.
At 11:30 I was pulled over by a cop for going eighty on the highway and promptly given a ticket I could pay off over the course of a month if I opted out of eating for thirty days and sold my soul. I broke down. I felt stupid. I felt reckless. I felt crushed. I felt out of control. And somehow in my hysteria I found myself shoeless and coatless in an Exxon parking lot.
And then there he was: a mullet, stonewashed jeans, and a NASCAR t-shirt complementing my perfect shoes, my perfect shirt and my perfect earrings. But they weren’t perfect. The shirt had a tear I strategically camouflaged and the earrings were so cheap by the end of the night my earlobes were swollen. But the shoes, my prized shoes, he didn’t know their brand he didn’t know their price all he knew is that he liked them: scuff marks included. They were just pretty, pink shoes that in my lunacy I had kicked off and scratched up. But that’s life. Nothing is perfect. Sometimes you just need to throw your Manolos.