Hello, underpants.

I see you laid there, all alone next to the bus stop. Your wobbly white leg holes frowning beneath your powder blue waistband. How did this happen? Who abandoned you?

Were they the absent-minded type? Did they drop you on their way home from swimming? Perhaps you’re a casualty of a botched trip to the laundromat. It’s ok, you can tell me.

I have to be honest, for a minute there, I was worried you were a victim of something more…biological. It’s what everyone expects when they see undies in your situation. But no, by the looks of it, the worst you’ve seen is perhaps a morning of light decorating followed by a brisk walk to the shops for a celebratory flat white. If it were dysentery, there’d be no mystery.

Maybe it was a bad break up. Maybe—and I’m sorry to say this—you made a pork chop of yourself one too many times. Couldn’t resist sleazing over the top of waistbands at parties, maybe? A fan of an ill-timed slide down butt crack way were we? Look, I get it, you’ve got a hard job. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to let your hair down every once in a while? Some bosses are tough that way. Imagine being Jeff Bezos’s boxers.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re more like a cocoon—discarded in a gleaming moment of triumph. I can see it—your owner’s eyes sparkling as they stand from the bus stop bench, Instagram in hand, resolute in their purchase of new sweat-wicking compression shorts. That is the missing piece you see; they’re going to hit the gym all the time now. They lock their jaw and cast you backwards, over their shoulder as they step onto the bus and into a new life—slow motion flames and explosions blooming behind them. Like when Jerry Maguire walked out of the office with his goldfish and Renée Zellweger.

What can I say, friend? Social media is coming for us all.