Prompted

My apologies to the button: I am partly to blame for your volatile sense of identity.
There was that one time I played "word bingo" with a pair of first graders. We covered our words with odd buttons selected from a tin of odd buttons that had been added to over many many years. I remember the way their short, eager fingers raked through all those colorful plastic shapes, making a crispy, crackling sound; a joyful sound. The happiest ones would come across a button shaped like a starfish, or a buckle for overalls. This was after an eternal two minutes of searching, the other twin bouncing with impatience in his seat, saying, "Come on, Agustin, come ON!" But, in that moment, there was nothing more important than finding an oversized hot pink button, or an odd plastic feather.
I guess what I'm saying is I can see how this kind of thing pisses you off. To have so much more expected of you than you can really offer, to be a set of poorly drawn circles at the gateway to a flood of memories.
I think, though, that buttons can really make or break an outfit. There is nothing that makes you feel like you're falling apart more than a button drooping on its thread, tugging it towards the floor, giving in to gravity, like all of us must do eventually. Buttons are supposed to stay upright, and cling to your sternum, and hold your soul in there, I guess. Keep your heart from bursting out of your chest, whether with pride like they say, or desperation, which might be the opposite of pride, or at least pride's enforcement officer. Case in point, I have several buttons that need mending. Well, some of them are still completely attached, but also entirely hideous, because I shop at thrift stores, and I see the potential in things, I see a dress or a dog or a person as an aesthetic, a holistic entity, I look at their background, and then use that as the context for the terrible marks that life has left on their appearance, the things that need mending, or in some cases, replacing. I have put them along with the garments that they are still semi-attached to in the hall closet, the one with the jackets that no one wears anymore, and the bags that no one carries anymore.
You can call me sentimental, and I know you will. I can see your glare in your colors, in your angry fluorescence, and I see your youth and your stubbornness in your wobbly but determined lines. You can tell me that you are less than this, but you tell, and that is how I know you are more, this is how I tell that I am alive, because I am insightful, or, at the very least, sightful, meaning sighted, and also seen. I see and am seen, and that is nothing and everything all at once. Feeling, however, is different, is step-by-step, and I must confess, I have never had a necessity to really feel a button.
There can be anger in buttons, and sadness waiting in closets. Like going through a loved one's things after they've died. There can be emptiness in a pot full of soup and no one to share it with. And so, there can be a button where there are only circles, and there can be circles where there is really only ink and fibers, and fibers where there are really only polymers, and polymers where there is really only nothing.
Is that what I'm sorry for? It must be something.