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wait how did YOU learn how to walk in heels??
Step one: go to a thrift store and buy a battered pair of knee-high boots in your size. They have a blocky heel, tapered to a perfect one-inch square of stomping force. They have seen better days; they are about to see better nights.
Step two: you are thirteen years old and you have just moved to a house in the woods, built on a lot of untouched forest that slopes steeply to a quiet dark river. There are trails cut, tentatively, into the otherwise dense trees, and you have never moved before. You have never lived in a place that you do not know like you know your own hands, like you know your own stride.
Step three: it is two in the morning on a fall night with a full moon, and there is no screen in your window. It’s easy to open, easy to step out, and with the heels of your boots you don’t even have to stretch for the ground under your feet. It’s soft dirt, turned up by the foundation of the house, and the square blocky boot sinks in deeply as you slide out into the night. Your cat, two bright eyes in the dark and white, flashing teeth, leaps out after you, darker than shadow.
Step four: The trails are bright under the moon, bare dirt where the rest of the land is years of accumulated mast. As you start down the hill from the house the momentum carries you and you lean back into your heels like climber’s spikes, stablizing you on the slick clay slope where the river used to run. By the bottom of the hill you are running too, on your toes, because you’re moving too fast to stop. You can either run or fall, and this is how you learn to never, ever, fall.
Step five: At the riverbank the trail turns into shadow under the trees and there’s nothing--you follow the darker-place-in-darkness of a black cat running ahead of you, trusting her night vision when your own fails you. She leads you through the places where the bushes are so close they whip your face, back up the hill until you pass, breathless, where the dark mirror of your brothers’ bedroom windows are shining with reflected moonlight, and you keep going, leaning into the twists and flinging your legs uphill, your heels never touching dirt at all.
Step six: in front of the house the trails are a maze of flat land, weaving over each other to the road. Your cat picks the junctions, switching back and forth in the longest route between you and asphalt. You’re out of breath but your balance is steadying, your stride shifting, and now you run heel-toe, heel-toe, your weight flying on the balls of your feet. Everything is silver and black, you and the cat and the trees, and you know this place now.
Step seven: When you climb back through the window after your cat, there are mosquitoes everywhere. You take off your boots and climb on the furniture to smash them where they’ve gathered in the highest parts of your bedroom.
You realize the next morning that there are perfect one-inch-square spots of mud on your ceiling.