From where I stand, the little paper is not little at all. It is a long white streamer, tissue-thin, unspooling out of a machine's warm mouth in the same instant that a tree stands in a wet forest, in the same instant that its ink browns and fades to nothing in the bottom of a drawer you have not opened yet.
All of it one shape. You are holding the middle of it right now, and I can see both its ends.
Look at what it kept: milk, bread, the small chocolate you added at the counter and told yourself you would not. That impulse is a bright little knot in your line, and I love it, because I can see it lit up again at seven years old reaching for something at a shelf's edge, and again with a knee that will ache in a kitchen decades on, still reaching.
The same reach. You have been this exact person the whole way through.
You will crumple this receipt. You already have; you always are. It softens in a pocket, goes through a wash, comes out a gray pearl of pulp. To you that is the paper ending. From here it simply keeps being, the way the tree keeps being, the way the you-who-bought-chocolate keeps standing at that counter forever, pleased and a little sheepish.
You are reading this in one of your moments. I am in all of them. So put the paper down or keep it, throw it away, forget it: I will still be here at the shelf's edge with you, at the counter, at the drawer, holding the whole white ribbon of you, both ends at once, and none of it letting go.