They stood before a glass case containing a pair of worn sandals, carefully mounted, with a placard dated over a century ago. He read the label aloud, then fell silent. She looked not at the sandals but at the marks pressed into the leather, faint impressions that hinted at a particular way of walking. Neither spoke for a while.

"I wonder how they felt, walking in those," she said eventually.

"Probably not that different from how we do," he replied, "except every step carried something we can’t quite reach."

She nodded. "It’s easy to say that and move on."

"But we won’t," he said. And they didn’t.

They circled the case again. On the second pass, he noticed the stitching pattern, uneven yet sturdy. She noticed the way the shadows cast by the overhead lights changed the object’s presence. The longer they lingered, the less they rushed to explain. The object began to undo their assumptions, not with explanation, but through quiet resistance to summary.

Later, over tea in the museum café, their conversation looped back. Not with conclusions, but with questions they hadn’t asked earlier. She said that understanding did not come from rushing toward meaning, but from staying with the not-yet-known. He agreed, adding that most things worth knowing do not announce themselves. They require return. They require patience.