Shoes

My mom, my sister and I were on the metro. There was a lady with her partner sitting in front of us. My mom and she started having a conversation, and at some point, she told my mom that we reminded her of her daughters. She seemed quite melancholic. You could tell that she was missing her daughters a lot. My sister and I joined the conversation, and she was telling us about her and her family as well. Later in the conversation, I told the lady that her shoes were beautiful. My comment was random, but I just felt that they were. As soon as I said this, she said ‘oh, thank you so much, dear, do you like them?.’ And I said yes, that they were beautiful and looked very nice on her. Well, she took her shoes off, told me that they were new, that it was her first time wearing them, and then gave them to me. She even put on a pair of sandals she had in her bag! Of course, I said that I could not accept them, that I felt thankful, but that I could not accept her shoes. She insisted. She wouldn’t let me leave the train without the shoes, so I ended up accepting them. It was kind of crazy because I had been wanting those shoes for a while, and we couldn’t afford them, and then this lady that we just met gave them to me with so much love and with any sort of hesitation.
The end of the story is that we left the train, and we never saw her again, we never exchanged our phone numbers or emails… But the shoes are still in my closet, reminding me of her kindness and those deep eyes people have when missing a loved one.