Sparrow

Same Walk, Different Shoes

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

---

They called themselves The Castoffs. It was a dumb name and I told Jay as much.

Jay. Their leader. None of them would have admitted to having any kind of hierarchy, but I knew Jay thought himself that way.

I was 20, then. I'd lived in more places than I had years. Not that I chose it that way. There wasn’t any rhythm to it. It was a jump-start, up-and-go type thing. Three months in Brussels. Five in Lille. Maybe six at some small town I don’t care to remember. At 15—and can you believe I was so dumb as to think this is it, this is where I’m meant to be—I spent a whole year in Paris. A good year, at first. One in which I began to nurture the love I always knew swam within my soul: a love of music. Before my mother left, she’d gifted me a flute. It was an instrument that captured me. That still captures me. How could such a slender cylinder of holes so shape the sound that flowed through it? That year in Paris—with the people, the city, the art and music, the feeling that I was beginning to understand myself and who I might be—came with a piece of hope. But I was too young then to realise that hope flew in with a devil tucked under its wing.

Paris didn’t want me. Paris didn’t let me stay.

In those years of my teens, I moved about across the many scattered leaves of our family tree, deposited from aunt to uncle, cousin to cousin, relative to relative, always ending up at whoever would take me next. No one wanted me, not after what I’d done, and that fact seemed to stick to me, linger like a scent I took everywhere, one that no amount of scrubbing could rid from my skin. I tried to fit in, find my way at school and study hard, but the difficult re-entry of each new classroom always reared its ugly head across my fractured education.

Through some miracle at 18, I got myself enrolled at a university. Actually enrolled, via a scholarship my great uncle forced me to submit and one that he supported via his association with the university. I know, of course, that it was just a means to get rid of me, but it worked. Off I went. Industrial design. What was I thinking? Like I could actually wield art for something useful. Christ it makes me cringe. Six months, I managed, the joy of that beginning dashed with the cruel reality of isolation, alienation and confusion, all topped by a course I was wholly unsuited for. Throw in some bullying? Sure, why not. It’s so weird to look back on that. I don’t know who that person was, how they could be so stupid, so naïve, so ready to think that starting a degree whilst housing that simmering state of mind would actually help things. Did I really think it would function as a balm for all the years before?

It wasn’t a balm. It was a catalyst.

I dropped out, forgoing the scholarship, an unceremonious departure with nothing but my own tears to send me off. I had no family to pick me up, no friends to hug and feel reassurance. Not exactly the way I imagined I’d leave. I could draw a graph of my mind in those six months. It’d be like the tracks of a rollercoaster plummeting into the earth.

And after? There’s a haze when I think back on that. I bought a tent with what little money I had, because apparently my mind still had some sense of organisation. I bought supplies, bits of food … I don’t know. The town was fringed by enough woodland that I just, well, camped. I just stuck myself out there in the woods and planted my ass in the soil, staring at the water that washed through the nearby creeks, moving myself every few days for fear of lingering in one spot for too long. I ate tinned food that I kept buried in the ground, stockpiled like I was a squirrel. I ate berries that sometimes made me sick. I drank water through cupped hands. I barely washed, my hair growing out, the ends a straggly mess. But I had no mirror to see that, the only face the foreign being who stared back at me from the water’s edge. I played my flute to console myself, letting music speak the elegies of the life I could have had—music to be heard by no-one save the forest.

All I wanted was to be alone.

I remained that way for the best part of a year, hard to believe. I’d drift into the city and beg on the streets, using whatever change was thrown my way to buy more food. At one point, I nearly sold my flute. I actually walked into a pawn shop, clutching the flute to my chest, mumbling out a question of how much it was worth, refusing to let go when the pawnbroker asked to inspect it. I couldn’t sell it. I walked away.

Sometimes I stole from the markets, head low and sobbing as I ran away with fruit or a strip of cured meat, a handful of I’ve no idea what. Unless you’re like that, thrust into nothing, with no one there for you, with no friends, feeling too ashamed to return to the fragments of family who might not even take you, with no idea how you’re gonna eat come next week; unless that’s your world, you don’t realise how damn resilient a human is. How much it can survive even if it doesn’t want to.

I didn’t want to.

But I lived.

Somehow, I lived through that, reaching a point where I started to move beyond my little woods-and-city existence, heading south. By the spring of my 20th year, I hauled my sorry ass away, hitching rides if anyone would take me, trudging roadsides whenever they wouldn’t, following a path to wherever the meagre sails of my life felt the tug of the wind.

And that was when I found Jay and his gang.

I was in the outskirts of Lyon by then, the dusk of one evening bringing with it a sudden and bitter cold. My feet had brought me along the Rhone, to where the railway line crossed to the west. There was a depression there cut into the underside of the bridge and without realising it I found myself drawn that way, pulled toward the sound of an accordion that wheezed its melodies out into the night air. I saw a group huddled around a barrel—the types of folk I’d avoided in my time as a stray, never wanting to mix or socialise—but before I could turn and leave, one of them saw me and beckoned me over with a wave of his hand. My tent and backpack were slung across my back, but I guess it was the look of my hair and dirt on my skin that gave it away. Before I knew it I was stood next to the heat from the barrel, a jug of warm soup placed into my hand by a man who simply smiled. He told me his name was Jay. In that shifting light from the fire, his wrinkled features made him seem at least 70.

“Thank you,” I managed.

He nodded, at first saying nothing but then letting slip a string of the nicest words I’d ever heard: “You are welcome here with us.”

I hugged the soup as he gently tugged me away, showing me around the corner to where a small array of tents were pitched on the sloping grass. “We will move tomorrow,” he said. “People like us cannot stay. But you set your tent up here for now.” Jay was French, I realised. His skinny face betrayed a larger build beneath, his accent soft and with a hint of someplace else.

I did pitch my tent. It was the best sleep I’d had in a year.

The following day, sure enough, the group packed up and moved, hugging the river and then heading across a footbridge to the west. Jay spoke to me on that walk.

“We call ourselves The Castoffs,” he said, motioning to the rag-tag bunch who walked ahead of us along the path.

“The Castoffs?” I repeated back. “That’s a dumb name.”

Jay smirked. “Yeah? Well, you know where you can shove it.”

An uncertain and foreign smile appeared upon my lips at that. I turned to him, feeling suddenly at ease in his presence. “I know where I can shove it,” I agreed.

As we walked, he told me of their group and each member, the way they survived moving from town to town. Busking, mostly. All of them were musicians, somehow divorced now from their previous lives. Sometimes they begged, he said. They’d stay in a place a day or two before the authorities would move them on. Longer if a campsite would have them. He spoke of how the winters are harsh but in their harshness it shapes you, toughens you like the disdain felt from those who pretend not to see as they walk so easily past. He reeled off a hundred towns and cities he’d been in over the last decade, the way members had come and gone, the type of music they liked to play, his love of Vivaldi, Grieg, Handal, Dvořák—a series of names that spoke to me, and as he said them I was aware of my flute still buried at the bottom of my pack.

The following morning, though, my brain seemed to restart. I felt guilty, unworthy, that my presence would be a burden. I felt the cloying sense of others, the eyes of judgement, the sense that a faint simmer of hope would soon come with its own betrayal. So I packed up my tent in silence and made to slip away. I got about five metres before Jay’s hand landed on my shoulder.

“Where you going, now?” he asked.

I stopped, refusing to turn. His hand hardened on my shoulder, but he said nothing.

I was shaking, I realised, and then I heard myself speak. “Why’d you let me in?” I asked, finally turning to face him.

“You think I would let you walk away, Sparrow?”

Sparrow. I don’t know if that was some special thing, like it had some deeper meaning, or whether he was just trying to be cute, like Jay and Sparrow. The previous night around the fire, he’d told me how he had a daughter once, and there was such a look that came across his face I didn’t dare speak. He said no more, just gazing up at one of those rare cloudless nights where the stars remind you of the world that hurtles your body through space.

Or maybe he’d just seen a sparrow that morning.

Whatever it was, it stuck. It’s all he ever called me.

“I’m just going to get in the way,” I said as his hand slipped from my shoulder, my head defaulting to the ground.

A short stream of air huffed from his nostrils. “No.” he said, then took my hand. “You join us, you work with us. When you are ready, then you leave. Right now? No. You’re not ready.”

I didn’t believe him, but he didn’t let me leave. He kept me there, he held me—not with his hands, but with his words and that rarest of things called humanity.

There’s little point in detailing all we did over those months I was with them. I don’t remember which places we went, how many countries I lived in across that time. There’s little much I can say about how it changed me, too, because that change was already there, within. It just needed time to come to the surface, to be nurtured by a love from others, to allow me to end up where I am today. And although I continued to have moments questioning whether I belonged, I did remain with them. Soon enough I played with them, finding again my love for music, theirs and my own.

I left The Castoffs when I was 21. Almost a year I’d been with them. Almost a year of meandering week to week, city to city, park to park, busking and begging, adding my flute to their broken melodies, slotting into a routine that I could eventually call my own. There was, in the end, still a part of me that wasn’t ready to leave, fearful of whether I would be capable of returning to a place I’d never been. But I was ready, of course. I think Jay knew that would be the case, even from that first moment. He was just tending to his Sparrow, waiting until it was ready to leave. I still remember what he said that day I left.

“Now you are ready, Sparrow. You do good out in this place you belong. But you remember old Jay.”

I couldn’t say anything to him, the tears that streaked down my cheeks like a thousand rivers blurring my eyes as I walked away. I remember his words every day I go to sleep. I hope someday I might see old Jay, that maybe his Sparrow will fly back for one last tune.