#OfficeWornStories

We are celebrating the release of Emily Spivack’s Worn Stories with some of our own tales!

Share yours! Tweet us @AbramsChronicle with#WornStories

Working through our Digital department and continuing the shoe trend with Emma and a story of first love, which was, like the Titanic, not unsinkable…

I mean, I guess you could say I liked my Chelsea Boots.

It would, however, be more accurate to say that they were my feet. Worn until they feel apart and then worn some more.

My mother bought them as a Christmas gift the winter I moved to Oxford for university. I honestly can’t remember what I’d worn to trudge around the city’s icy cobbles before these babies came into my life. Probably leopard print ballet pumps. Not ideal.

They’re not very stylish but, my god, are they practical. The type of thing orange Julian who steals all Bridget Jones’ mother’s money would call ‘an all-rounder, the sort of thing one can wear with anything to any occasion’. And so I took orange Julian’s advice and wore them everywhere. As tough as they were to break in, they were also tough enough to endure a move to London and many treks around European cities, add an edge to girly dresses and withstand festival crowds, long stints in the library and the urge to kick mean boys in the shins.

And then, as if all of a sudden, they began to give up. Still attached to my feet, as soft as slippers, they became just as waterproof. I began walking around puddles rather than through them and avoiding littered gum and discarded cigarettes.

You really will never notice how much vomit there is on London’s footpaths until you have a hole in your boot.

I clung on to the bitter end. They were the Jack Dawson to my Rose DeWitt Bukater. I could say ‘I’ll never let go’ until I’m blue in the face but, once they were wet, we were through and I dropped them into the vast skip outside my flat and got on with my life.

Their memory lives on in the new sleeker, tougher Chelsea Boots currently attached to my feet. Throughout the living hell of breaking these ones in, I mourned my first loves drowning in a sea of rubbish, ill-equipped to protect themselves from the rain.

Worn Stories by Emily Spivack – PAPress – OUT NOW!