The Brown Ankle Boots Worth Your Money

One of us has a pair she’s worn into the ground and calls “the only shoe,” and another one thinks brown ankle boots are the thing you buy when you’ve given up on making decisions. That’s the ledger split, basically, and it’s been going for two years and nobody’s budging.

I’m somewhere in the middle, which is annoying, because I own three pairs and can defend exactly one of them.

The good one cost sixty eight dollars at the shop on my corner, the one with the Tuesday restock I have real feelings about, and I’ve worn it enough times that I did the cost per wear math on my phone standing in line for coffee and got nineteen cents. Nineteen cents a wear. I said it out loud and the barista looked concerned.

The bad one was ninety, full price, from a brand that made me feel fancy in the store and stupid four wears later when the seam at the heel just gave up. Ninety dollars for four wears is twenty two dollars and fifty cents a wear, which is worse than owning nothing, honestly, that’s a math problem I didn’t need solved.

Here’s the actual test though, not the receipt, the puddle. There’s one outside my building that looks like a shallow little nothing and is in fact ankle deep, I’ve confirmed this twice, and the good boot walked through it and dried out fine overnight. The bad one let water in through the seam that was already failing and I spent a meeting wiggling my toes trying to feel less damp about my life choices.

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The quiet neutral thing is real, I’ll give it that.

Brown goes with more of my closet than black does, somehow, and I didn’t expect that going in. It’s not exciting to talk about. It’s just true every single morning when I’m not thinking and grab the boot instead of deciding anything.

The gamble pick, and I’ll say it plainly, is the pointier one I bought because it was twelve dollars and I liked how it looked on the shelf. It does not look like that on my actual foot. It looks like I’m cosplaying someone with a more dramatic commute. I’ve worn it four times, always half convinced, and I’m not going to pretend it’s for everyone, it’s for someone with better ankles than mine and more nerve than I currently have.

My mom saw the whole collection lined up by the door last month and said I was one trash bag away from a documentary, which, fair, but two of these paid for themselves and I’m not getting rid of anything until I know which two.