The Sole (Soul) I Forgot I Wore

I spend every waking moment locked in my room; even the shadows seem to forget I am there. The world knows me holding a pen and paper; my family knows me as a divergence—a branch growing away from the sturdy tree of our shoemaking history.

I’ve convinced myself that drifting away from our heritage was a revolutionary act, an act where my poems carried the burden of continuing it. I revolted alongside the Franz Kafka book and coffee resting at the edge of my table.

When I finally emerge from my room, I feel like a celebrity, showered with praise because it is probably their first time seeing me again in what feels like eternity. Perhaps I wasn’t a celebrity, but a shoe in the making, refusing to see itself as a shoe.

My Mamita (what I call my grandmother) often scolds me for my posture, my music taste, and my habits. It is almost guaranteed that every time I see her, she has something to say. And it is what I expect every morning—besides my cup of coffee, of course.

She goes on and on about everything—I mean everything—especially her time with my Lolo during the early years of their shoe manufacturing business, reiterating for the thousandth time how difficult life was back then.

I used to see these stories as a plain old broken record, but in actuality, they are the backbone of this city—a backbone tracing back to 1887, when Kapitan Moy first deconstructed a pair of British shoes in Marikina to learn the secrets of their stitching.

The scolding is not about my slouching back nor the music I play at max volume for the whole neighborhood to hear. It is about quality control. Mamita observes me as if I were a piece of footwear still lacking its final pair of stitches. She adds another pair (another scolding) until I recognize its importance, ensuring that I will not break my back walking alone on the pavement of the real world.

The calluses on my hands were made to stitch words, yet in my pursuit of revolution—an act of trying to be different—I seem to have forgotten that the soles I wear now are the soul that keeps the Shoe Capital of the Philippines breathing.

My hometown, our hometown, was stitched with necessary precision and elegance. It was built by the shoemakers of the past, now slowly being buried in history.

They do not belong only in history books. They belong in the soles of our feet and in the souls that continue to beat for our stitched heritage—one ink stroke at a time, one stitch at a time.