It was nothing special. A small child’s shoe, pink, slightly worn at the edges, lying between the double yellow lines and the pavement. As if it had fallen in a hurry. As if no one had noticed.
I stopped. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it wasn’t meant to be there.
I took a photo. My own shoes stood across from it, almost awkwardly. For a moment, it felt as though we were looking at each other. Not me and the shoe, but my present and a past I can no longer remember clearly.
Because once, we were that too. Something small that hadn’t yet decided anything.
There were no “shoulds”. No silent checklist that begins to form as you approach thirty. A job. Stability. Relationships that lead somewhere. A life that looks put together, or at least convincing from the outside.
I looked at the shoe and thought of something we say too easily. In another time, in another Cyprus, I might already have had a pair like that in my home. Not lost on the street, but left in the living room, next to toys and half-finished afternoons.
And it’s not that this would have been wrong. It’s that it is no longer inevitable.
Somewhere between a lost child’s shoe and a set of double yellow lines lies the distance a woman has travelled. Not just here, on our puritan island, but everywhere. From “will” to “maybe”. From “when will you have children” to “if you want to”. From a life designed for you, to a life you must, and can, design for yourself.
But freedom does not arrive quietly.
It comes with noise and second thoughts and that unsettling question that appears when you least expect it: am I late?
Part of you wants to go back. To a time when the only thing that mattered was not losing the other shoe.
And at the same time, you would not trade what you have now. The ability to choose. To make mistakes. To take your time. To not explain yourself.
The shoe stayed where it was. Small, quiet, almost stubbornly alone in the middle of the city.
Some little girl lost it. Maybe she cried. Maybe someone picked her up and told her it was okay.
And it is okay.
Because as you grow older, you begin to understand that the things we lose are sometimes just signs that we are moving forward.
I walked away. But for some reason, I still think about it.
I only hope for something very simple.
That she finds it. Or that it finds her.