hopped on the bus to go to best buy and buy a new apple pencil. i needed to. my life has been completely uprooted since i lost my old one. i told the checkout cashier that i was paying cash and that it was about to be very needlessly complicated (lol). i brought my busser tip jar and pulled it out of my backpack and started counting out $158 in $5 bills and coins. it came to 95 cents in change, but she was 10 cents short (understandable, who even pays cash anymore?) and all the other tills were closed. so she had to call up the manager and exchange $15 in bills for some rolled up stacks of change. it took so long that she handed me a tiny notebook and a pencil and told me i should sketch something in it while i waited. it already had a few adorable sketches of (presumably) customers that she (presumably) had put there. so naturally, i added my own while we waited. she opened the rolled-up stack of 5 cents and the top one was so hilariously rusty that we just stood there and laughed about it for a couple seconds. she counted out my change for me and sent me on my way. i’m walking back to the bus right now and i just pulled the change out of my jacket pocket to put it away. it’s 3 nickels and two dimes, and if my math skills serve me well (which they usually do not), this is not 95 cents, unfortunately. she definitely meant to use quarters instead of nickels. but i am so unbothered by it...it was one of the first things that’s happened to me in many months that has felt genuinely real.
edit: i found my lost apple pencil immediately after replacing it. the next morning i pulled out a pair of jeans i hadn’t worn since the beginning of november, and it was right there in the front pocket.