An Open Letter to Boring Soap

Dear Boring Soap,

We want to start by saying we have nothing against you personally. You showed up. You lathered. You rinsed away. For years, arguably decades, you were present in the shower every single morning and you did what you were asked and nobody complained.

Nobody was particularly excited either.

The truth is we didn't know it could be different. You were the only soap we had ever known, and the shower was the shower, and we got in and things happened in a predictable order and we got out and that was that. We assumed this was what a shower was. We assumed you were what soap was.

We were working with incomplete information.

What We Now Know

A soap can do more than clean. This is not an accusation. It is simply a fact that we have recently come to understand and felt you deserved to hear directly. The shower can be a place where something fun happens when you soap yourself. Something that actually makes you look forward to the bubbles and the lather and the daily routine.

You never gave us that. We are not angry. We are just aware of it now.

On the Subject of Your Label

Your label may say things like refreshing and moisturizing and occasionally with the fresh scent of ocean breeze, which is a phrase that has never once accurately described anything that has happened in a shower. We used you under the ocean breeze premise for years. The shower smelled like a bathroom. It smelled like it always smelled. There was no breeze. There was no ocean. There was just the shower, and you, and a routine that had not changed since we were old enough to shower unsupervised.

We are not saying you lied. We are saying the ocean breeze did not materialize and we noticed.

What Happens Now

We have found a different soap. It is called BumZap. It does something to the butthole specifically, which is a sentence we understand sounds like a significant departure from where this letter started, but stay with us, because the point is that something happens. In the shower. To a specific place. And it is real and it is interesting and it makes getting into the shower feel like a thing worth doing.

We will still see you at hotels. We understand you have a life outside of our bathroom and we respect that. The little wrapped rectangles on the sink — that will always be you, and there is dignity in that.

But at home, in our shower, things are different now.

We wish you well,

BumZap