The tin used to hold mints. It is shallow, with a lid that fits tight enough to keep paper from curling in the humidity, and it sits on the corner of my desk between a lamp and a stack of scrap maps that never graduated to proper notebooks. On 11 June I emptied it onto the table — not to count, simply to see whether the stubs still arranged themselves into any kind of story.
They did not. They arranged themselves into creases. Bus receipts from routes I take without thinking. MRT entry slips from days when the gantry printed them before the card system took over completely. One cinema ticket from a screening I remember liking but cannot name. Each stub is a coordinate without context — proof of movement, not proof of meaning.
Every stub is a line that ends where my memory refuses to continue.
I unfolded the oldest one carefully because the paper had thinned at the fold. Holland Village to Commonwealth, printed in fading thermal ink, date smudged to the point where only the month might be trusted. Did I go for dinner? For a friend's appointment? For nothing except the ride itself? The stub does not say. It never said. That was always the limitation of this kind of archive.
I sorted the pile by colour instead of date — blue MRT slips, beige bus slips, the odd pink parking coupon that must have entered the tin by mistake. Colour at least gives a texture to the heap. Date would have lied anyway, given how many prints are incomplete. The sorting took twenty minutes, which is longer than it should take for worthless paper, and yet I felt calmer when the piles were separate, as if separating them drew faint boundaries on a map that had been smudged into one grey mass.
My neighbour knocked once during this process — not on my door, on the wall, which is how we signal tea offers without committing to a full visit. I did not answer immediately because I was mid-stub and did not want to lose the order. When I finally opened the door she had already left a cup on the corridor shelf. Kopi o, correct sweetness. Another human holding a line I forgot to document.
I returned to the desk and wrote route numbers on the scrap map under each pile, where I knew them. Route 100. Route 147. A bus number partially visible as 3? maybe 32. The question mark annoyed me and I left it because annoyance is also a kind of honest notation. Maps that pretend completeness erase the question marks, and I am trying to stop doing that.
By evening I refolded most stubs back into the tin. A few I threw away — duplicates, blanks, one so faded it marked nothing. The tin is lighter now but not empty. I prefer it not empty. An empty tin suggests I will start collecting again from zero, and I am not ready to declare a new epoch of travel. Continuity matters even when the individual stubs cannot explain themselves.
I placed the tin back on the desk and weighted the lid with the urban planning book I borrowed in April, still unread beyond the first chapter. The weight keeps the stubs flat. The book keeps the tin from sliding. Together they form a small landmark on a desk that otherwise changes layout weekly.
Before sleeping I drew the tin from above — circle, rectangle lid, approximate shadow. I did not draw the stubs inside. Some layers are better implied than illustrated. The drawing sits now beneath the lamp, another partial map among many, accurate enough to recognise, incomplete enough to belong here.