Towels

What cruel extremes we are exposed to. Being singed on radiators, dried out in a cupboard all squished together like sardines in a tin, or hooked on such a painful spike – do bodies not realise how uncomfortable it is to hang like this? Perhaps they think it preferable to being discarded carelessly on a floor and stepped on many times a day. How degrading it is to be treated this way! Other times we are rubbed and tightly wrapped over naked skin. You think this is fun? These bodies are wet, they simply deposit their moisture into our fibres and after our momentary pleasure of closeness and feeling needed we are we are left cold, damp, twisted and discarded. What life is this? To be used and abused on such a frequent basis. To make matters worse, every now and then these bodies seem to have the urge to completely humiliate and torture us. Throwing us into a confined metal space and trying to drown us in soapy water while spinning us in circles. Realising their attempt on our life is futile they roughly remove us from the death box and begin wringing us instead! We get stretched out, thrown over a line and clipped to it, no escape. We are left to survive the elements, to be burnt by the sun or tossed around by the currents of wind, before being bundled up, once again suffocated by other fibres, so ungraciously mixed together with underwear and all manner of things! You would think it couldn’t get any worse, but it does. For we are then spread out across a table that is too small to hold our size and subjected to being burnt and flattened by a metal device which steams and hisses in such a way as to elicit great fear in even the hardiest of us. It is almost a relief to find oneself back on the wooden racks amongst peers though not the least comfortable in our tight origami folds, while we wait for the day we will be spread out and used once again. It is a wonder we survive such ordeals. But we are tough. We stick it out. We are towels.