Restriction: Use all the shoes in your household to make something, or work on a single pair of shoes that were destined for the thrift store.
I’m going to tell you a story about my shoes.
I keep buying the same kind of shoes. They change the model a bit, but I get the closest one. All black. Sometimes the stitching is white. Sometimes the sole has a small red mark. They are my shoes. I no longer know how many pairs I have bought, but each has lasted me years.
They roll beneath me as I stride through the night. I am a passenger of the moon walking in a stark asphalt shadow. When a car breaks our silence, it rushes by, blinking headlights, and the engine’s rumbling hushes quickly out of reverence for the purity of the air.
On carpet and on tile, indoors, my shoes complain. They squeak angrily; and their soles, new or beaten down, creak with each step. Here, now, on the frozen cement and pavement, they are home. Carrying me silently onward, each step an exact fraction of a breath, each block of concrete underfoot another increment on my path home.
We walk for hours. Traffic thins until there are no cars. There are no other pedestrians. There is only the vague trail of my exhaling vapor in the air as my shoes and I silently pass through this dreaming night.