The button

Fragment #68

A black round button fell to the ground as I pulled my keys from my pocket this morning. It had detached from my coat maybe six months ago, leaving behind ripped tendrils of severed dark grey thread, bunched together like a prodded spider. I picked it up from the floor and held it in my hand, the pleasing memory of its familiar form returning instantly. Its prolonged stay in my pocket had now been a half-year-long deceit since I had no real intention of sewing it back into place. There seemed little point in returning it to my pocket, yet it was now unthinkable that I might throw it away, for I had become used to it being there, perhaps for no other reason than the small occasional pleasure of its weight and feel. My neck was cold without being able to fasten the collar. Perhaps I still believed that I might yet repair the coat.

Later, at the train station, I pulled my ticket from that same coat pocket and offered it to the slot at the front of the platform gate. I fed it into the contraption to reappear inverted at the top of the machine. As with the button, I found myself once again shaken by an unremarkable thing: the wonder of something so seemingly insignificant. I removed the ticket – the gates opening like saloon doors in front of me – and walked through, with a sudden anxiety that this small yet arresting moment had so quickly been lost to the past. Each moment of the day disappears like this: anticipated sometimes, but happening and gone instantly, and with the next moment and then the next clamouring to bury each previous sensation. I wanted the moment back, to find it again, to live it once more; not because of any particular value, but to celebrate it for being without any – these thousand small graceful acts of life which suture together a day. I walked up the stairs, turned right and on towards the end of the platform, losing grasp all the time of that delicacy, sensing some unstoppable dismantling force, like a wind stripping the seeded head of a dandelion.

This morning, before the station, before the button, before those thousand small moments, I woke my eldest daughter as I always do. I brushed her hair back from her face lightly and whispered, ‘Good morning.’ I saw her eyes, underneath her lids, sliding like slow-moving magnets towards where she knew me to be. I kissed her cheek and her eyes opened, then faltered shut and then opened again. Then her hand came down gently over mine, which lay across the top of her breast bone. She let it rest there, closed her eyes again and pushed her tongue into the corners of her mouth, to break the small web of film that had formed at each end. These seconds, these moments that come before she is conscious of anything else; only me, only us, only these feelings. I love to find her still sleeping each morning that I go into her room. I then went to wake her sister, but she was already awake: her eyes smiling just that fraction before her mouth shaped the same expression. She stood and jumped excitedly as I approached, lifting her arms ready for my own to slot underneath and lift her from her cot. She seated herself on my arm. She still doesn’t care for kisses, but I kissed her anyway, into her soft hair, softer, four years younger, than her sister’s. I carried her downstairs, her arms around my front and back to steady herself as we descended. I called for Tilly to come join us and Bessie echoed a refrain of her sister’s name, which she still pronounces with a soft ‘D’ at the front.

The weight of things. The significance of things. The gentle things that so nearly escape. The things we need to hold on to. The button. The ticket. First words. The beginning of a smile. Light and gossamer-thin things that a wind can take from us so quickly.¹

1. I first wrote a version of this piece fourteen years ago. I’d scribbled a note onto the postcard bookmark of the book that I was reading. It read, ‘button/train ticket/waking girls’ and it was simply a reminder to write something about the trauma of watching seemingly insignificant moments fall away from us into the past.