We pay to go somewhere else. But we never arrive free.
The answer, of course, is that it is.
I step out. The door thuds shut. The taxi pulls away, brake lights bleeding red into the night. And I stand there—holding a receipt for 28 minutes of my life—wondering why it feels like a ransom note. taxi bill
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." We pay to go somewhere else
But we are all articles left behind. A glove. A phone charger. A half-finished sentence. A promise we forgot to keep. I step out
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.