I remember the start of a school year. New books, new bags, new uniforms, and of course, new shoes, which I always hated because of those dreaded shoe bites. The beginning of a new academic year always coincided with the onset of the monsoon so new footwear meant those horrible plastic shoes or gum boots. They were hard and brash, pinching and hurting my heels and toes, making my feet sore and walking next to impossible. My feet were always covered in band-aids and I would wail each time I had to slip on my footwear. I longed to kick it off and just run barefoot, breathing free and easy with no discomfort and definitely no pain. But it always took a while for my feet to attain nirvana and so I had to suck it up and continue forcing them into those brutal contraptions (that’s what they seemed like to me) until they were broken into, finally releasing me from hell. Eventually my feet and the footwear kissed and made up and then settled into an odd comfort zone like a well-heeled marriage. By then it was time for the monsoon to leave its last showers and for me to move on to regular footwear, which if new meant another couple of weeks of torture. 

So this morning, I was thinking these random thoughts in a feeble attempt to iron out the creases in my mind after a night of barely any sleep. And it struck me how just like shoe bites, we actually suffer from people bites each time we stumble into a new association with another person. It’s not always magic and flying unicorns and things mysteriously falling into place. There is that odd adjusting period that you often cannot escape – two people as different as stop and go trying to flow together in the same direction. And there are no band-aids to help either.