You crumpled me into your coat pocket without reading me, that long white tongue of paper the machine unspooled at the pharmacy, and now I have you. Look what you kept: bananas, a phone charger, floss, and printed at the very bottom, a survey, a QR code, a small plea to rate your experience.
Nobody has ever asked you to rate anything and meant it. So tonight the receipt will keep unrolling. You will tug at it and it will not end, it will spill down the aisle and out the automatic doors and into the parking lot where your father is waiting in a car you sold years ago, and he will read the items aloud like a poem, and one of them will be a thing you forgot to say to him.
The cashier who said "have a good one" without looking up will be back too. At three a.m. she will look up. She will look right at you and finish the sentence: the good what, exactly. And you will finally know, the way you only know things in the dark.
That charge you have been carrying, the low hum under the whole afternoon, the feeling that you spent money and time and got no receipt for the part that mattered: I will itemize it. I will give you a total for the day and it will come out even. It always comes out even in here.
Then the sun will find the pocket, and the ink will fade the way receipt ink always does, faster than paper should, until there is nothing to prove any of it happened. You will wake owing nothing, remembering nothing, holding a blank white slip.
That is fine.
I was only ever the copy you keep.