I bought a new pair of jeans, with three chunky fake diamond buttons on the fly.
The buttons were big. The buttonholes were not. When I undid them for the first time, in the dressing room, I had to sweat with the effort of it all. They were relatively easy to do up but ridiculously hard to undo.
A wise person would have said, "this might not work out so well if you're in a hurry to pee," and put the jeans back on the shelf. I thought, "well, they're just stiff. The buttonholes will stretch. They'll be fine."
The other day I wore them to work. After a couple cups of coffee I needed to use the bathroom, but procrastinated for a while because I was in the middle of a project. When I finally took the opportunity to use the loo, I had to go so bad that I was walking bow-legged.
I stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, found an empty stall, closed the door and, with some relief, started undoing my new jeans.
Oh crap, I thought, as my fingers began wrestling with the stupidly oversized buttons. I could not get that first button to move. It was stuck. Like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole stuck. I pulled and I wrenched and I sweated and I swore but could not undo the top button.
Fine, I thought, I won't go to the stupid bathroom, but my fulsome bladder was saying, "uh-uh, you can't give up. This isn't a game, sister, or some diet you abandon. This is a bonafide emergency and I gotta GO."
Feck, feck, feck, I thought, as I fought with the stupid buttons on my stupid fly. Sweat was pouring off me by now, making my fingers slippery. I wiped them off on the dark denim of my jeans, the ones I was supposed to wash before I wore because of the heavy overload of black dye, but didn't, because why bother, and my fingers came away with a ghastly dark blue hue, like a corpse. A sweaty corpse. A sweaty corpse who had to pee like a racehorse.
I couldn't believe the ridiculousness of my situation. In a frenzy of ineptitude I poured renewed frenzy into the undoing of the buttons, corpse fingers grappling, tongue gripped between my cursing-like-a-sailor lips, bladder screaming "OPEN THESE GD PANTS NOW OR THEY'RE GONNA BE YELLOW," and I thought, for one horrific moment, that I was going to have to call the fire department. Have them burst into the bathroom stall and say, "Just relax ma'am, it's going to be fine," and then cut them off me with the jaws of life.
In that instant the button, finally, undid. I plopped down on the toilet and peed, oh blessed relief. When I was done I pulled up my jeans and hesitated before doing them up. Should I? Shouldn't I? If I didn't do them up, they'd fall down. If I did, I risked going through the same rigamarole in an hour or so because, once the seal is broken you pee all day.
I debated for a few moments longer, finally deciding to do them up because what they needed was stretching, and if I didn't stretch those buttonholes, the jeans would never be wearable.
I did them up. And went back to my desk.
An hour later, my bladder started making itself known.
"Shut up and go back to sleep," I said.
An hour and a half later, I was starting to feel uncomfortable. All I could think about was the bathroom stall, the sweaty blue fingers, those ginormous buttons.
The clock ticked.
My fear grew.
The buttons waited.
