The kid at the register asked if I wanted my receipt and I said yes, which surprised us both. Most people wave it off. It's just a strip of thermal paper, curling already in the heat of my hand, the ink faintly blue, a list of things I bought and the exact minute I bought them. 7:52 PM. Register 4. A gallon of milk, bananas, the good coffee, a birthday card.
I keep it because it's proof. Somewhere on this planet, at that minute, I stood in a bright box of a store and decided a specific person was worth a card. The receipt doesn't know that. It just logged the transaction.
Up there you can't see any of this. Not the store, not the parking lot, not the line of people waiting to buy small necessary things. The whole eastern seaboard is a smear of gold at night, and every dot of it is somebody deciding something like this. You'd never guess. It all looks like one lit-up nervous system from four hundred kilometers up.
The paper's already fading. That's the thing about the cheap kind. Leave it in a drawer a year and the whole record goes blank, milk and coffee and birthday card, gone to a gray blur.
I fold it into my wallet anyway. It'll outlast the milk.
Not by much.