The mirror in my parents' bathroom is the same one my father shaved in every morning. I'd been avoiding it for a year.
A hard year. My wife left, the business almost went under, and I spent most days in the dark. I took a leave of absence, told myself I needed time.
Yesterday was my first day back. I fixed a washing machine for a woman who cried with relief. The job was simple, but my hands remembered how to do it.
When I got home, I stood in front of that mirror for the first time in months. The face I saw was my father's: same tired eyes, same gray stubble.
Tucked in the corner of the frame was a tiny plastic bag with a spare button from my mother's sewing kit. She'd put it there for my father, in case he ever lost one off his work shirt.
He never used it. She never threw it away.
That button has been waiting there for thirty years. A small, stubborn proof that someone was paying attention to the small things.
I looked at my own reflection and saw the same stubbornness. The door I thought had closed—the door of being useful, of being someone's—wasn't shut at all. It was just waiting for me to come back through.