The travel-size shampoo bottle

Eleven months of the year it lives folded into the corner of a toiletry bag, decanted only briefly into total relevance for however many days a trip requires: three washes, sometimes four, if the traveler is frugal or the trip runs long. Few objects hold such a narrow window of relevance with so little resentment about it. The cap is the weak point, always. It works loose in transit, seals itself shut with a crust of its own contents, or opens fully upside down in a side pocket and quietly ruins a paperback. Books are lost this way, four and five at a time across enough trips, and still the same three bottles get refilled rather than replaced, a loyalty nobody can fully explain except that they have earned it through survival. The bottles themselves are almost always the wrong size for what they are asked to hold: too large for the trip, so half comes home unused, or too small, so day three arrives shampooless and the traveler improvises with the hotel's own. There is a particular satisfaction in the bottle that lasts exactly the length of the trip and no longer, empty on the final morning with nothing wasted and nothing missing. It happens perhaps one trip in six. The other five, the bottle simply goes back in the bag, half full, ready for whatever is next.

H. G. Plimsoll