My Sole Purpose - NEW! - Complete short story.

It’s been hours. Way too long in fact. I have had hard time knowing what was real or not, what is the pure fruit of my imagination and what isn’t. The smell is at its maximum capacity, all of the shoe is warm and molding around Abby’s socked foot, just like you expect a 3 years old shoe to do. She is probably super comfy in there, not even caring that I am suffering. I am stuck under her toes, not directly under them. Abby thought it would be funny to take out the worn-out insole and sew me under it, with a small hole for my tiny minuscule face to stick out right under where her second toes would arch. The white dirty humid cotton sock fabric brushes against my tiny face mercilessly over and over again. She told me she would give me some fresh air time, but still hasn’t. 

It’s been hours. 

Abby shrunk me about a year ago to keep as an insole pet for her pure sadistic pleasure. I used to be her best friend. Now, not so much. She doesn’t even give a flying fuck about me and it’s getting worse and worse, especially since she sewed me tot hat insole a week ago. She hadn’t got me out of the shoe yet. That old black DC skate shoe with the pink sole, pink insole and pink DC letters on the side. She’s been wearing those non-stop and decided to make me suffer their awful stench. When she was sewing me she kept saying things like “I won’t even feel you anymore.” Or… “You’ll regret being born when you drown in my foot sweat.”

Luckily for me, I’m not dead yet. I’m still hoping Abby to get me out of that old shoe, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Right now, I am more worried about the fact she hasn’t even dangled a single time since she put them on this morning to go to school. She really couldn’t feel me anymore, all the insole absorbing the tiny lump of my one inch tall skinny body. I am worried. The air is stale. I can feel her standing on me, fidgeting in place while talking to friends. It must be half-time of that stupid football game. We’re already late afternoon. She hasn’t let me breathe fresh air for way too long. 

I see stars, sometimes nice nebula or constellations. I am free, she is growing me back again, kissing me, telling me she loves me. She wants to cuddle. She wants to embrace me like if I was important. The sock brushes against my face, beads of sweat surround the small hole my face is trapped into, threatening to drop in. She is hugging me, telling me it’s been all a bad dream. We hold hands while we walk under a late afternoon warm sun, near the river. She is beautiful, her long blonde hair flowing in the wind like a golden wheat field. She twists her foot over me, grinds me further into the shoe like if she wanted to remind me that she still cares about torturing me, but not the rest. 

I have a hard time with reality. Since I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, my life changed completely. People didn’t look at me the same, my parents, my friends… Abby said she didn’t want a freak friend. She was scared of me, feared my hallucinations, didn’t want to hang out with me anymore, despite me trying to tell her that I was still the same. She wanted a real normal friend, not a sick one. I wish things have been different. I don’t know why I got this stupid hell of an illness, but it got hold of me. The voices, the images, the visions, the noises, the hallucinations. She said that if I wanted to remain her friend, that I had to do everything she said. I agreed. I didn’t want to lose her. She started bossing me around. She enjoyed having control over me. That way, she said, I would be in check. I think she bossed me around like that because it made her feel better. She was way too scared that I was schizophrenic that establishing control over me would reassure her, make her feel more confident. Everything we don’t understand scares us at first, right?

And then there was that day she had one of our teacher’s shrinking remote control, and she said if I wanted to remain her friend, I had to let her shrink me. I thought it was a big joke, I thought it wasn’t real. I thought it was a trick played by my imagination. One of those bad dreams again, happening to me for no reasons. I laughed, then I said: “I want to be your friend.” She shrunk me. 

She is walking now, without even the single tiny care in the world that I had been in there without fresh air for all day long. Unending hours of her foot trampling me, crushing me mercilessly. Nobody knows I am trapped in her shoe, everyone is completely oblivious of my existence anymore. People thought I left the country, or that I died lost deep in the woods, or that I’ve been kidnapped for human trafficking. I don’t know, maybe they just didn’t care for me being gone, who wants a sick person in their entourage? Who wants to be friends with me. 

It’s okay. I accept the fact people may be thinking that, yeah, poor Tina, her life sucked and it’s been hard for her. For me. I am Tina. I am Tina right?

Yeah I am, I think. What’s left of me at least still remembers my own name, between stomps, between stars and hugs from my best friend and perhaps only friend Abby. I see the smile on her face. She is having fun with her real normal size friends at the school football evening, probably eating popcorn in the bleachers with a large coca cola. She doesn’t’ care I am in her old worn out shoe. I’ve been there for so long. 

Way too long in fact. 

I hope she won’t start denying my existence, because I fear I will no longer believe I am human. Maybe... in fact.... I am a shoe. Maybe I’ve always been an insole and I have been hallucinating myself as a real person. Maybe smelling my best friend’s foot all the time is my purpose. 

My sole purpose. 

The end.