The bill says thank you at the bottom. Thank you for riding. Thank you for paying. Thank you for moving through my city without touching it.
But we are all articles left behind. A glove. A phone charger. A half-finished sentence. A promise we forgot to keep.
I look at the fine print on the back: Not responsible for articles left behind. taxi bill
The answer, of course, is that it is.
The meter clicked. Every tick a small death of possibility. The bill says thank you at the bottom
We pay to go somewhere else. But we never arrive free.
It remembers the rain we drove through—the way the city blurred into watercolor lights. It remembers the silence between two strangers who shared a back seat for half an hour, the driver's sitar music bleeding softly from the front, and how you finally said, "I think I’m losing the ability to cry." Thank you for moving through my city without touching it
I fold it once, then again, sliding it into the pocket above my heart. Not for reimbursement. Not for taxes. But because this scrap holds more weight than its algorithm of distance and idle time.