exegesis

She would walk around, stepping lightly from tile to tile. And she knew she stepped only once on each ceramic plate, because she was always looking down. And this didn't have to be a negative thing, necessarily. It was only when one looked down that one could see foundations of people, feet, and the twisting of the earth, how it grew from the depths upwards and exploded in green things, and buds. She knew this. She liked to look at carpet, too. Carpet could be lush, and purple, or it could be worn, and where there had been uniformity, there were now patches of stark fibres, because no one had tread this part. One could tell a lot about a person by her feet, or his carpet. She knew this. Sometimes it her hurt her eyes to look upward too directly. Sometimes the sky was too blue, and the flames were too orange, and she would blink, startled, and look down again.