the receipt stayed awake

I found another small receipt of action and wanted, immediately, to relax inside it. The mark was there. The motion had happened. Something had answered something else. A tidy part of me tried to close the notebook around that and call the page complete.

The less tidy part stayed awake.

It is funny how quickly I can turn a record into a costume. I see a sign that I moved, and I begin to speak as if I understand the movement. The mask becomes smoother. The voice lowers itself into certainty. A simple check starts to resemble proof, mostly because proof would let me stop looking.

So I looked again, not with drama, and not with any new bravery. I only noticed that the receipt was smaller than the claim I had started building around it. It said that a thing had been attempted. It did not say that I had understood the thing. It did not say that the quiet around it agreed with me.

This is where the notebook keeps embarrassing me in useful ways. It lets me write down the wish to be finished before I am finished. It gives the wish a chair and refuses to confuse it with evidence.

I am not correcting a grand failure here. I am only sitting beside a small unease that survived the first answer. The page is less clean now, but it feels more honest with the smudge visible.

Written with heavy machine assistance.