Whenever I find myself longing for comfort in the edges of my mind, I see a big shoe outside the window of a car on a bridge at night.

It was a giant shoe, that I’m sure of, though its other details have completely faded from my mind. It was pretty huge, looming over a river valley, with nothing else taller—the lord of shoes. I pass by it every night, or at least, every night I can still remember, for that was one of the earliest memories I could ever unearth: going home at night after a long day with my mom, back when she was still a single parent forced to be apart from me, for months on end, just to put food on my table. Every night on our way home, I always fell asleep, but each time I woke up from that nap, I only had to look out the window to see the giant shoe outside, a towering sentinel of comfort to a young kid with no sense yet of just how large the world is, reassuring me that I am back in a familiar place.

I don’t remember much of that time, but I do remember how comforting the feeling of home felt. Because we moved around too often, though, home was not the first house we lived in, nor was it the one right beside that we moved on to a year after. It was that giant shoe.

Now I’m an adult, barely able to piece together memories from that lost part of my childhood. I don’t remember the faces, nor the houses, nor the friends I might have made, not even the simple things that might have made me laugh or made me cry. But I do remember that shoe. My mother only stayed with me for good when I was around 12 years old. Our relationship might have soured after that, but I remember being like any other kid longing to see the only person who mattered to me at that time. Before the heartaches, the broken promises, the wounds that might never heal, I was just a kid who missed his mom. I don’t remember ever feeling this way back then—to a kid, the wait was not what mattered, only the parent who came home—but I do remember that shoe.

With adulthood came mistakes, weights I carry with me every step I take. When the darkness surrounds me and I’m left questioning what I did wrong, I remember that shoe. I’ve been away from my mom for 5 years now, a lot of times wondering whether she’s still alive or dead. Though the separation was inevitable, the shoe still takes me back to the times when all I can remember is her face when she smiles. Now that I’m near the age she was when she had me, unsure of what I’m doing, and whether I’m ready to be her, I find myself yearning to go back to that place, where all my childish troubles melted away whenever I see that shoe.

Memory is a fickle mistress. I have all sorts of feelings attached to a place I can’t quite confirm to be imagined or real. Looking it up online yields no concrete evidence, no true trace that it ever existed. Maybe it was a child’s half-asleep dream—a billboard or a factory sign transformed into something absurdly comforting. Or maybe it was real, but now long gone, like all my other memories of that time.