Lacing My American Shoes: How a Pair of Nikes Carried Me Across the Ocean

I was a French teenager on a family trip along the West Coast -- wide-eyed and curious, tasting a life that felt bigger than anything I could imagine back home. There was a spaciousness in America I couldn't name yet, a kind of freedom I had never experienced.

I didn't know, not then, that I was about to buy the shoes that would eventually carry me out of France. In a store in Beverly Hills, I spotted a pair of Nike sneakers. That was before the global market existed, so you couldn't find Nikes in France. They felt like a postcard from a future version of me: someone bold, unafraid, athletic, walking with a different kind of stride.

I bought them, and when I returned to France, they went straight into my closet. For years they stayed there, quiet and patient and symbolic. Every time I opened the door, I'd catch a glimpse of them. They didn’t judge. They didn’t rush me. They just waited.

A decade went by as I became myself in slow, uneven steps. Ten years of wondering if the life I secretly longed for was meant for me, if the world I wanted matched the one I was born into. The stork, it seemed, had dropped me in the wrong house, in the wrong country.

And then, one morning, I was simply ready.

I opened my closet, reached for the Nikes, and laced them for the very first time. The rubber was still new, the laces stiff. These shoes had become my symbolic wings that were going to fly me across the Atlantic to a new life.

I bought my ticket, handled what needed handling in Paris, let go of a relationship that wasn't going anywhere, and packed.

I walked out of my apartment, pulled my suitcase into the street, and headed for the airport. With each step, it felt like I was stepping into the version of myself who had bought those shoes a decade earlier, someone who sensed, even then, that her home was in America.

Becoming American, One Step at a Time

Ten years after landing in Los Angeles, I received my green card. By then, America was home. I had built a life here. I paid taxes. I fell in love. I raised children. I stood in grocery store aisles comparing brands I'd never heard of as a teenager in France. I learned the rhythm of this country from the inside out long before anyone officially recognized me as part of it.

And still, another ten years passed before I became a citizen.

Twenty years of living fully, deeply, messily, joyfully American without the title. Twenty years of weaving myself into the fabric of this place—through friendships, heartbreaks, careers, adventures, triumphs, and ordinary days that felt like they could only happen here.

I laced up my infamous Nikes to go to the swearing-in ceremony. It was held in a federal courtroom, but the judge walked in carrying warmth, an ease that softened the air. Before any oaths, she invited us to close our eyes.

"Remember the moment you decided to move to this country," she said.

"The moment you chose a different life, a bigger dream, a better destiny."

Every person in that room came from a different corner of the world, yet the silence we shared was the same. We all traveled back to the train stations, villages, airports, buses, and childhood bedrooms. To the long nights weighing impossible choices. To the moment we first imagined it was possible.

I felt the memory rise in me: the curiosity, the longing, the spark of possibility. The teenage girl buying shoes she wasn't ready to wear. The young woman stepping onto a plane with more hope than certainty. The years of building a life from scratch.

When we opened our eyes, the judge told us she understood this journey. Her own parents had been immigrants. She grew up listening to her grandparents tell stories of their life in Europe—the sacrifice, the courage, the decision to cross oceans with nothing but hope and a few belongings.

That day, she said, we were joining a country; but as importantly, we were joining generations of people who dared to believe they could belong somewhere new.

Becoming American, she reminded us, was less about geography and more about spirit. It was a decision, a permission we had given ourselves to dream differently, to dream bigger, to dream wilder.

Only after giving us that time to remember, honor, and feel the full weight of uprooting ourselves for our dreams did she begin the oath.

The government handed me a certificate, my "diploma," as if I were graduating into being an American. After twenty years of living an American life, the paperwork was simply catching up to who I had already become.

After the applause and the judge's blessing echoing through me like a gentle drumbeat, I went home to a life I had already lived for two decades. Only now with a piece of paper naming what my heart had known all along.

Farewell to the Sneakers That Believed in Me Before I Did

Those Nikes lived at the back of every closet I moved into. Apartment after apartment, house after house. They weren't practical. I didn't wear them anymore. Their soles were outdated, their design long replaced by newer styles. But they stayed because they held a story: the moment I chose myself, the moment I allowed my life to expand beyond what I could explain to anyone.

They were proof that I had once leapt into the unknown and survived.

And that's why I kept them for so long. I wanted to remember that moment of bravery every time life asked me to jump again.

Then one day, during yet another move, I found the Nikes again. Tucked deep in a box, their soles stiff, their colors faded. They looked more like artifacts than footwear.

I picked them up and laughed at their stubborn loyalty, at my own tenderness toward them, and at the absurd, beautiful truth that a pair of sneakers had once held more courage than I did.

They had witnessed everything: my green card, my children, my reinventions, my new language, my citizenship, my American life unfolding. They had stayed long after they were useful, like old friends who insist on sticking around because they were part of the origin story.

But standing there, holding them, I realized that I didn’t need them anymore, because the wings had never been in the shoes. They had been in me all along.

So I let them go without sadness, but with a wink. A quiet thank you. A secret high-five to the girl who bought them, not knowing she was buying passage to her future in her country of choice.

And with a deeply felt gratitude for the shoes that had nudged me toward America, step by step, decade by decade, until I could finally stand here barefoot or in any shoes I choose, fully at home.