Notebook 041

Once upon a time there was a little doormat.
He wasn't anything special as far as doormats go, but he wasn't a overproduced and undermanufactured rubbish little thing.
He did have something about him.
The things with doormats is, they're made to be walked on. They can't deny their purpose no matter how hard they try to glam themselves up. 'Foot Cleaner', 'Entry Guard', 'Hospitality Note', they're all just the same thing with different names.
This little mat however, liked to be walked on.
As much as it hurt him when people would scruff their shoes on his edges, or MC Hammer all over his little wiry face, he smiled after they looked back with a smile. Even if they didnt, yet still had clean shoes, he would smile for their part.
From the day he first noticed his cosy sheltered doorway and his big black letters saying 'Welcome' he was content.
Even after a year of use and his 'welcome' had become worn, this smiling brown mat felt happy. His wear and tear gave him more character. A definitive past all of his own. War scars to show off in the most timid playground sense of war, but scars all the same.
But one day something terrible happened.
One day this poor little matt opened his screwed eyes, to see the foot leave his face clean and shiny. He smiled. Then he looked down and saw that all his letters had become so worn that they weren't even there anymore.
He felt so mad at first but he then realised it was not the foot's fault. What the foot did had made him happy in the past. He had taken pride in it. Sometimes, he remembered, he had even made the shoes clean themself on him when they weren't even dirty to begin with.
With the shoes not to blame he had nowhere to direct his loss. He became lost, confused and guilty because he could not decide if he was a mat, a rug or just a piece of brown flat with an indetermined life span in this tiny little doorway.
For days and days he sat, in his spot, no longer welcome nor uninviting.
He sat in his spot for weeks and then months debating with himself whether it was his fault for taking pride in something so destroying or the shoe's fault for walking on him too hard and too much.
Then one day the owner threw him out.
Little mat was no more.

The moral of the story is that sometimes doormats get walked on so much, they loose their 'welcome' and become worthless, no matter how proud a mat they are for the state they are in.