.
If the Shoe Fits
My mother said I had tunnel vision, seeing only what I wanted rather than the larger picture. But she was wrong. I knew the truth. I wasn't suffering from tunnel vision. I was suffering from psychological harm by her refusal to fork out 200 mobiums to get me by dream shoes.
It was a special need, I said. My ticket into the playground. To be as one with the world ("no mum, I'm not blindly conforming here"). Everyone at school was wearing replicas of the sneakers worn by the fastest thing alive, a.k.a. Sonic the Hedgehog. No, I didn't know how he felt about marketers taking advantage of his (and Robotnik's absence), with the latter locked in a cell alongside a trio of bumbling robots and the former going on adventures with his sidekick (forget his name, probably not important). But the fact was that everyone in the playground was wearing them and if I didn't fit in, I could be emotionally scarred for the rest of my life.
Alright, maybe half the playground was wearing them...or a third...or a fifth...or some even smaller fraction that second year mathematics hadn't covered yet. Fact was, I needed them to break into the crowd. To ensure my psychological stability and any other term I could bring up from mum's soaps. How she could be brought to tears by the medical drama Mouse (featuring a rat doctor with a cane no less) and not by my far more real plight was beyond me. How my own charms couldn't work on her was a mystery that not even Dahl Chickens could wrap up in a single novel. But mystery or not, I had to get these shoes.
It was an uphill battle. Pleading, whinging, sulking, crying...being grounded for a week...then carrying out a MAD policy and vomiting, ensuring mutual destruction of our clothes and dignity. A blight that drew my mum into a rage, but one I was willing to endure. I had to get these shoes, I protested, or life wouldn't be worth living. After all, hadn't Sonic saved Mobius from Robotnik and his goons so we mobians could...well, actually live? To be free and buy whatever we wanted? To take full advantage of the capitalist system?
...okay, maybe not that last one. I didn't even really understand what the word meant back then. But what I did understand was that I was cracking through my mum's armour as surely as Doctor Mouse drilled a hole into someone's head to remove...something (mummy said I should leave the room then). A few concessions on my part, a few chores, a few good grades and voilia, the shoes were mine. Oh, and a less extravagant birthday. No loss.
So the time came. My moment of glory. Me, walking into the schoolyard with replicas of the attire worn by Mobius's greatest hero (come to think of it, if Sonic never wore anything, doesn't that mean I don't have to wear my uniform?). My entry into...well, something that I realized was beyond me. For the shoes were worthless. They were outdated. The cool kids have moved on. They had taken the next step in fashion...
...their shoes had buckles on them.
I learnt a valuable lesson that day-you can't follow fashion blindly.
Rather, you have to follow it with your eyes on what could be fashionable in the future as well.
A/N
Considering that this is written in first person, I feel compelled to clarify that this isn't meant to represent me at all. Not only do I not live on Mobius, but I've never been too fussy about what shoes I wear, nor did I throw a tantrum when buckles "appeared" on Sonic's sneakers (probably for the best, since they were always there really, bar the limits of 8 and 16bit graphics). Guess that's the advantage of school uniforms-you don't have to follow trends.