I leave the sun and I strike the long white curl of paper on the counter, and both are the same nothing-instant to me. They say eight minutes passed on the way. I was not there for it. I was born and I am the receipt, and between those there was nothing, no dark, no distance, only arrival.
Look what I land on. A ribbon of thermal paper, still warm where the machine burned the ink into it, curling at one end like it wants to become a spring again. Numbers in a column. A total at the bottom, boxed, final. The little forest of tiny letters that says where it was bought and when, a time stamped right into it: 4:52 PM.
The human keeps checking that number against a rectangle on its wrist. Comparing one recorded instant to another. As if instants could be held. As if you could stand between them.
I gleam off the glossy strip and the human squints, reading, and I am already in its eye, its wet lens bending me down onto the seeing-part at the back. I make the ink black for it. That is my whole use here, to make the difference between the paper and the mark on the paper.
The human folds me, means to keep me, will find me gray and blank in a coat pocket in some season I cannot picture, because heat and light will have eaten the numbers back off. They tell me this fading takes months. Months. Another rumor.
I only know the flash where I lit the total, and that flash is my leaving too.