“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
I’m so grateful to be part of this project! I was fortunate enough to also participate in Volume One, and you can read my entry for that round here. I appreciate the efforts made by Ben for facilitating, and for each of the authors for participating.
Amputated
When I was a kid, I loved all the minibeasts and growing things. Ladybugs, rolly pollies, ants, worms, spiders and dragonflies. Dandelions, thistles, sagebrush, yarrow, and flax, you’d be hard pressed to find something growing out of or crawling over the earth that I didn’t love. We had a patch of lavender in the backyard, and I would sit down near it and count how many honeybees and bumblebees and butterflies and other visitors it would have. I would pinch the leaves between my fingers and rub them gently, then put my fingers to my nose and smell the warm, sweet, purply aroma. We had a little plum tree that was infested with aphids every spring. I called it the Ladybug Tree because ladybugs would lay their eggs on it and I’d spend most of May and June waiting for eggs to hatch, watching the larvae swarm the branches and then turn into pupae, and checking every day for new ladybugs to emerge. Whenever I found a spider in the bathroom sink or bathtub, I’d name it Fred and carefully shoo it out of the way so it didn’t drown. Or worse, be discovered by someone who didn’t love it like I did.
Mom dug up the lavender and threw it in the dumpster to make room for her new patio. Dad cut down the ladybug tree because “it was ugly.”
“Would you stop that?” Mom scolded me once when she caught me telling a spider in our garage how beautiful her web was. She lifted her foot to smash it.
“No!” I screamed. I grabbed her and tried to pull her away, but she was stronger than me. Dad told me it was ridiculous to cry over a pest, and to apologize to my mother for causing a fuss. I stopped talking to bugs after that, for their own protection.
Later, when I was ten, I scraped my arm as I was climbing out of a tree. It was a decent scrape, too. It bled more than any wound I had ever had in my life up to that point. When I landed on the grass after jumping the final distance to the ground, my head swam and my heart raced. I ran into the kitchen, covered in tears and blood. I thought I might die from that much blood loss; I had read in a book once that that could happen. Mom was on the phone. She whirled around and looked at me in alarm, then rolled her eyes.
“Good grief, Elaine, I thought you were dying!” She put the phone back to her ear. “Sorry, Janice, Elaine is just being a baby. No, she’s fine, it’s just a scratch. What was that you were saying about Susan?”
A new pain, this one somewhere in my gut, or maybe my heart, drowned out the pain in my arm. Stunned and silenced, I swallowed hard, turned, and went to the bathroom where I tried to wipe away the blood and awkwardly put several bandaids on the cut. Two days later, my dad took me to the emergency room with an extremely high fever, and swelling and redness on my arm. The doctor used syringe after syringe of saline solution to clean out the wound. It was a hundred times more painful than the original scrape.
“I know this hurts, Honey,” said the nurse while she held my hand and I cried and cried. Dad was in the hallway on his phone. “It always hurts most to clean an injury, and this one especially since it’s infected. But now it will heal and you’ll hardly even remember the pain.”
All Dad talked about on the way home from the hospital was how much it was going to cost him. How he’d have to wait several months now before buying that big screen tv he’d wanted for his birthday. How could I be so careless?
Now I’m a grown up, but I still feel like a careless, anxious little girl. I sit in the car outside the house with Owen, my fiance.
“I never liked New Year’s Eve,” I tell him.
“No? Why not? Didn’t you get to stay up late and have treats and sparkling cider or something? I assume your parents didn’t share the champagne with you…”
My laugh isn’t fake, but it isn’t entirely genuine either.
“They made me stay up. Said it was tradition. And yes, there were treats. Gross grownup treats, like caviar and olives and peanut brittle. No sparkling cider, though.”
“So, what’s not to like?”
“It was so boring! It wasn’t even a real party. They just wanted to sit on the couch and watch the countdown. Sometimes they’d have friends over, and they’d play boring games. They only noticed me when I complained about being tired, and then they just told me to stop complaining. And besides, you know how I like to get up with the sun.”
“Ah, yes. I can just see six-year-old you, sitting on the porch in negative five degree weather, waiting for the sun to come up over the mountain to give you that kiss on the cheek on New Year’s Day.”
“You mock me, but it was and always has been and always will be my favorite way to start the day, not to mention the year. And yes, I get that kiss every morning, no matter what the weather is. Unless I’ve been up so late that I miss the sunrise.”
“So what are you going to tell them?”
I inhale slowly through my nose, hoping the extra oxygen will keep me sane.
“What I already told them. We have had plans with your family for weeks. They don’t have a monopoly on New Year’s Eve, or any special occasion, anymore.”
“Good luck,” he tells me as I open the door. The cold hits me. I feel braced by it, though, not deterred or discouraged. I’m going to stand my ground this time. I’m going to speak my mind. I’m going to be calm and kind, but also clear and firm.
I knock on the door as I open it.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
“In the family room,” I hear my dad shout. I take a couple more deep breaths as I walk through the house to the family room.
“Where’s Owen?” Mom asks as she comes in from the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, I climb back into the car, still feeling a little dazed.
“How’d it go?” Owen asks. I stare out the windshield at the snow. It drifts down so softly and so quietly. It conflicts so starkly with the fog in my eyes and the hurricane in my gut that it mesmerizes me. I can hardly make sense of it. So soft, so quiet.
“They said I’m wasting everyone’s time with needless drama,” I answer after almost a whole minute.
“Hmmm. How rude of you.”
I let out a huff of air; still not quite a laugh, but close.
“This time it was…meaner.”
“Meaner?”
“It just escalated, and so fast. One minute I’m causing needless drama, and the next I’m the worst human being they’ve ever known. I can’t believe some of the things they said.”
“Oh, Love, I’m so sorry.”
“They called me a pest. Said I always crawl in and ruin things. They’ve never called me a name before.”
“Wow.”
“I told them I won’t be coming back again.”
He lets out a low whistle.
“How’d they take it?”
“Oh, same as they always have. Lots of eye rolling and hands in the air.”
“I think you mean it this time.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t think I do. Maybe it really is all my fault.”
“Nope, that’s definitely not it. You’ve tried, Lainey. You’ve tried every way you possibly could to help them see how the way they treat you hurts you. You’ve tried being direct, you’ve tried being patient, you’ve tried being angry, you’ve tried being kind. You’ve spelled it out in every emotional language there is, and they don’t get it.”
I nod. I know he’s right. I think he’s right. Have I tried everything? Is my experience of this relationship distorted because of my own insecurities and lack of self confidence? Am I insecure and lacking self confidence because of this relationship? Am I, like they said, just playing the victim?
“I want you to have the parents you deserve,” Owen says, “and I hope they’ll wake up and change one day. I don’t know if that will ever happen. What I do know is that this is not your fault.”
“It’s easier to blame myself, O. I love them, and it hurts to believe that they would intentionally, or ignorantly, do so much to hurt me. I think this has been going on longer than I thought. A lot longer. I’m not sure why I just started seeing it.” I pause and look at him. “Actually, I think it’s your fault,” I jest. His eyebrows raise.
“My fault?”
“I never had anything to compare my relationship with my parents to, until I started spending time with you and your parents.”
“You know what they say about comparison.”
“Yes, I know. But I also paid attention in high school English, and I know what a foil is.”
“Wow, you really are a nerd, aren’t you?”
I punch him on the shoulder. Gently. Sort of.
“Ow! Take it easy! I always wanted to marry a nerd.”
My heart aches in so many ways, I can’t decide if I need to laugh or cry. I do a bit of both just to cover all the bases. Owen holds my hand as I try to organize my emotions back into coherence.
“So you really told them you weren’t coming back? Ever?” he asks.
“That’s what I told them. Never ever. I don’t know. I suppose things could change, but they haven’t so far. I’ve been trying for years now to fix this relationship, to coax them and coach them into being the parents I need, but it only annoys them.”
“I know how much you wanted this to get better. I know how much you needed it. You didn’t want to cut them off. ”
“No, I didn’t. But I had to.”
I rub a small scar on my forearm and watch the snow drift down, so slow, so quiet.
While the doctor put the new bandage on my arm, the nurse patted my hand.
“I’m glad you came in,” she said.
“I’m not sure I am,” ten-year-old me said, still choking on tears.
“Ah, sweetie, I know that was so, so painful. But do you know what happens if you don’t clean a wound? It gets infected, like yours did. And if you leave it alone after it’s infected, eventually, it gets so bad, we have to take your whole arm off just to save the rest of you.”
The blood drained from my face and I felt faint. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have something that had been part of me since the day I was born suddenly be gone.
With some effort, I pull my gaze away from the snow to look at Owen.
“I do want to cut them off. I mean, I don’t. I wish I didn’t have to. But it’s the only way to save the rest of me.”
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses it.
“I have been alone and lonely my whole life,” I tell him. “Until you.”
“You’ll never be alone again. We’re going to have so many kids. We are literally going to make an army of best friends.”
I give him my first bona fide smile of the evening.
“And they won’t ever feel the way I have felt with my parents,” I say.
He shakes his head.
“Never. That ends here.”
“Something new is going to start with us. Something good and something whole.”
“It won’t be perfect,” he says with a cautious smile.
“No, it most certainly won’t. Good things take effort.”
“And struggle.”
“And mess. I hear kids are messy.”
“Very messy.”
My smile starts to fade as the pain of what’s just happened seeps back in. He squeezes my hand.
“If tectonic plates didn’t collide, we wouldn’t have our gorgeous mountains, right, Love? If wildfires didn’t rage, forests would suffocate themselves. A caterpillar literally dissolves and digests itself before turning into a butterfly. Okay? Beautiful, worthwhile things don’t just happen. They come by way of that effort and struggle and mess we just talked about. I’m not scared of any of those things. You won’t be perfect. I won’t be perfect. Our children are bound to be absolute hellions. But we’ll talk, and we’ll listen, and we’ll forgive, and we’ll adjust as needed, and we’ll be beautiful for it.”
He puts the car in drive and we start towards his parents’ house.
“Did you know,” I say a few minutes later, “amputees almost always report having phantom pain in the limb they lost? Isn’t that strange? And frustrating? Why should something that’s no longer part of you still be able to cause you pain?”
“I did know that, actually. I have a cousin, Lily. She’s on my mom’s side, so you haven’t met her yet. They live in Canada. Anyway, she lost her legs in a car accident years ago when we were teenagers.”
“I remember you mentioning her. It was a drunk driver, wasn’t it? I can’t imagine that. I’d be so angry.”
“Oh, she was, at first.”
“How did she get past it?”
“I wondered the same thing, so I asked her once. She said if she had kept focusing on what was lost, she would stay lost. By focusing on what she still had, and being intentionally grateful for it, she found joy. She was an athlete. Cross country defined her. It was what everyone knew about her. She said, ‘That was stripped away, and you know what was left? Me. Actual me. All of me.’ Oh, and she said those phantom pains eventually went away.”
I’m lost in thought for several minutes before he speaks again.
“Did you know,” he says, “that some animals, like salamanders, can amputate their own limbs to escape from danger, and then grow a new one back again later? It’s not the same limb, mind you. It’s completely new, but it looks and feels the same and does the job just as well. Wild, huh?”
“Wild.”
When we get to his parents’ house, I head to the restroom to wash up. I flip on the light and am startled by something scuttling across the sink. It’s a huge, black jumping spider.
“Oh, Fred,” I say. “It’s just you.”
The protagonist has such a sweet voice. This line felt like the essence of her: “I stopped talking to bugs after that, for their own protection.” Glad she has Owen :)
What a beautiful, wrenching story. Told with such tenderness and empathy, this is the epitome of what this project is about. Amputation as reality and metaphor works so well. Bravo.