we walked into that one. and made friends.
The shoes are brown oxfords. So soft out of the box, as Italian shoes are. I haven’t worn them in a while — because I don’t need to wear brown oxfords when my daily outfits are big concert tees and shorts.
We wandered into the shoe store because it was our first trip to Florence — Firenze if ya nasty — and we were told we had to buy Italian shoes. Makes sense. We had stopped by some random little artisan workshop I learned about in one of my internet black holes, but that was a bust. I did not need custom shoes with a long lead time and high price tag because they would be handmade by an Italian grandpa. Anyway, we stopped into this store because shoes were displayed in the window, and we figured why not. He didn’t find a pair he liked in his size. I found a pair I liked in mine. We bought the shoes.
That part of the story has a clean ending. Girl sees shoes. Girl buys shoes. Girl wears shoes.
Inside the shop, a fabulous couple was browsing, and wondering aloud — in English — whether to buy these gorgeous red boots. R, after a few days of hearing zero English being spoken and getting by on “grazie” and “prego” while I stumbled through the rudimentary Italian I learned on the plane, was so excited to hear words he understood. I cannot overstate how elated he was to hear English. (We are so American.) He commented that the shoes are amazing and they should buy them. We started talking — the way you sometimes do with strangers when you’re traveling and your guard is down and you have nowhere to be. We asked if they had bought shoes here before (low key, R and I just wanted to know if we had stumbled into the Payless of Italy). They told us they buy multiple pairs of shoes at this store every time they’re in Florence. Solid endorsement.
They ended up not buying the red boots, because the store was out of stock in their size. They left, I browsed, I bought the aforementioned brown oxfords.
When we left, we thought: That was nice, they were so sweet. We’ll never see them again.
We walked out of the store, new shoes in hand, and got gelato from our spot across the street: La Carraia. (Yes, it was our first time in Florence, but we already had a favorite gelato spot.) For me, a lighter, likely fruity flavor. For him, something chocolate. Now with shoes and gelato in tow, we started our walk across the bridge (Ponte alla Carraia) back to our hotel.
And there they were. On Ponte alla Carraia. With gelato from La Carraia.
I don’t know exactly what we said in that moment. It was probably like, “oh hi, what are the odds?” — whatever you say when you’re surprised and slightly delighted and don’t yet understand that the moment you’re standing in is going to matter.
We learned their names, Robert and Mark. That La Carraia was their gelato spot too. That they’re from San Francisco. That they were on their honeymoon. And — within the first ten minutes of talking — that Robert was R and Mark was me. The gay alternate-universe versions of us, personality-wise.
We planned dinner for a few nights later.
Robert and Mark are now some of our dearest friends.
They’re the kind of friends you make plans around, like adjusting your Hawaiian vacation dates so that it overlapped with theirs. The kind whose texts light up your day. The kind where we’ve stayed at their San Francisco apartment when they were out of town, because we were in town, and they insisted we shouldn’t stay at a hotel. The kind that refer to their guest bedroom as “your second home”.
We found them in a shoe store we walked into because… there were cute shoes in the window. As is the case with shoe stores.
I think about the version of that afternoon where we don’t stop. Where we’re on our way somewhere, or the window catches our eye and we keep moving anyway. I’ve kept moving past a lot of windows.
What would Florence have been? Still great. We’d have hit our reservations, seen the things on the list, gone shopping, come home and said it was wonderful.
And Robert and Mark would exist somewhere in the world, and we’d have no idea. We wouldn’t miss them. You can’t miss people you’ve never met.
That’s the part I can’t shake. The loss is invisible. You come home full and happy and completely unaware of what you didn’t find.
There’s a version of this essay where I say something about luck, about how you can’t engineer the best things in your life. And that’s true, but it’s not really what I’m sitting with.
What I’m sitting with is: I didn’t choose the accident. The shoes were in the window, we stopped, Robert and Mark happened to be in that shop on that particular afternoon, we all wanted gelato, we all walked on the same bridge home. None of that was a pre-planned decision.
But everything after was. The dinner we said yes to. The choice to invite them to our wedding. The next trip we overlapped on. The friendship we decided, slowly and without ceremony, to keep building.
The luck got us to the bridge. We did the rest.
I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately — we just saw them in Hawaii, and we’re making plans to visit them in San Francisco in a few weeks. When we tell people how we met, it sounds unbelievable. And I keep wondering how many bridges I’ve crossed where I just didn’t happen to look up.
What I know is that Robert and Mark are in our lives and we’re better for it in ways I couldn’t have predicted — and it started with a shoe store we almost didn’t walk into.
I still have the shoes. Brown oxfords, soft as anything. Worth every bit of stopping.
The friendship was not on the receipt, but I’m keeping it anyway.
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