If there’s one thing I love to do when I wake up in the morning, it’s rummaging through my sock drawer for 20 minutes only to find that I have seemingly dozens of mismatched socks. Because apparently, there’s a magical creature that’s taken up residence in my washing machine who periodically steals a single sock from the dryer. But they only ever take one.
It’s like a really passive-aggressive middle finger because if both of them were taken, I might not even notice the crime. But no No NO, they consistently take a single sock if and only if the entire pair still exists. So over the course of several months I gradually end up with fewer and fewer pairs of matching socks.
In my infinite wisdom, I went for variety over consistency in my sock inventory. They’re not even the SAME LENGTH. Sigh. Maybe I can find a dating app that pairs you up with a partner who shares the largest overlap of similar missing socks - I bet it’d be at least as effective an algorithm as whatever they use in eHarmony.
Where the hell are they going anyway? Is there a portal to Hogwarts in every single laundromat? Am I secretly being used in a covert underground railroad type situation to free house elves from captivity?
Also props for the Harry Potter series going in a very different direction stylistically to the classical depiction of elves in the fantasy genre.
Alternatively, maybe they’re being filched by monopods, a mythological single-legged hominid purportedly found in the depths of India and describe by Pliny the Elder in Naturialis Historia.
I wonder if there were ever a pair of conjoined twins born joined at the hip who went on to smash the world records in the 100 meter dash in the monopod olympic games.
I’m at the point where I’m considering attaching Apple AirTags to every single pair of socks that I own. As it is, I now have a huge number of socks that are borderline useless unless I can find a very specific charity that donates clothes to wartime victims who lost a limb.