This is my bag of buttons.

This is my bag of buttons. I have had, and added to, this bag of buttons for at least twenty years. It holds all of the extra spare buttons that have come with the clothing I have purchased (shirts not withstanding, those extra buttons stay on the lower placket where they’ve been sewed on at the factory).

I have never taken a button out of this bag. It is one-way traffic for the buttons. It is the Hotel California for buttons. They can check out anytime they like, but they can never leave.

I cannot bring myself to throw the new spare buttons away. That would be irresponsible. I have a new garment. What if this is the time that my incredible run of button luck should come to an end?

Yet I never take out the old buttons. So now it’s just one deafening cacophony of fasteners, the chaos rendering the whole useless, since I’ll almost certainly never be able to find the button that, as so far, I have never needed.

These buttons haven’t just been orphaned, they’ve been purposefully created to be ostracized, perhaps permanently. Estranged from their kind, damned to spend their days carrying with them the burden of almost certain uselessness, cursed to bathe in the macabre longing for schadenfreude, for without calamity materializing upon his brother, these buttons are doomed.

Spare a thought for my bag of spare buttons.

— fin —