((hot)) | Taxi Bill

The machine exhales a ribbon of paper—thin, thermal, unfeeling. $24.50. 11.3 miles. 28 minutes. The taxi bill lands in my palm like a verdict.

We don't talk about what a taxi bill actually measures. Not miles. Not minutes. But the cost of not being somewhere else. The price of leaving before the fight ends. The tariff on grief expressed in motion— I paid to move through space because I couldn't move through this. taxi bill

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. The machine exhales a ribbon of paper—thin, thermal,

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." 28 minutes

The meter clicked. Every tick a small death of possibility.

We pay to go somewhere else. But we never arrive free.