You sit there, a quiet monument to my habits—
tiny tombstones of meals half-forgotten.
Breadcrumbs in the keyboard.
A graveyard of snacks and quick bites,
the silent evidence of late-night hunger,
of mornings too rushed for plates,
of days when the laptop was a dining table.
No one tells you how crumbs become fossils,
buried beneath letters, between spaces meant for words,
but here they are.
A constellation of crumbs,
mapping the history of every sandwich,
every muffin devoured between deadlines.
Look closer.
That isn’t just a crumb—it’s a memory.
A fragment of the toast I ate while
halfheartedly responding to an email,
a relic from that bag of chips that kept me going
through endless revisions.
Like a diary written in crumbs,
the kind no one will ever read,
but there it is—
my story, one flake at a time,
caught between Q and W,
buried under the space bar.
It’s funny, isn’t it?
The way we scatter pieces of ourselves,
leaving traces of what sustained us,
or what distracted us,
or what we devoured in silence
while pretending to be productive.
The crumbs know the truth.
They always do.
They sit there, lodged in tiny crevices,
mocking me for multitasking,
for turning my keyboard into a feeding trough,
for thinking I could type and chew and live
all at once.
The crumbs see through the performance.
They linger long after the task is done,
mocking my efficiency,
their jagged edges, a reminder of the mess I made.
But isn’t that life?
A mess hidden beneath the surface,
ignored until the keyboard starts to stick
until the letters get clogged with the weight of neglect?
It’s never just the crumbs.
It’s what they represent.
The lazy afternoons when I should’ve gone for a walk
but instead opted for chips and a screen.
The nights when I worked through dinner,
picking at whatever was nearby,
pretending that food didn’t matter as much as finishing.
Each crumb is a small failure.
Each crumb a confession.
But maybe I’m being too hard on myself.
Maybe the crumbs aren’t failures at all.
Maybe they’re proof of survival.
I ate, didn’t I?
I sustained myself through the haze of work,
through the endless demands,
through the pressures to produce, produce, produce.
These breadcrumbs are the trail I left behind,
like Hansel and Gretel,
guiding me back to a time when I was so busy
I couldn’t even stop to wipe my hands.
And who’s to say that’s wrong?
Who’s to say there isn’t a certain beauty
in the crumbs that gather
in the spaces we ignore until we can’t?
There’s life in the debris.
There’s meaning in the mess.
These breadcrumbs tell a story of days survived,
of hours spent chasing something bigger,
even if that something was just another task,
another email, another line of code.
So, let the crumbs stay.
Let them nestle into the keys,
an unnoticed archaeology of the mundane,
a quiet rebellion against the idea that
everything needs to be clean, polished, and perfect.
I’ll vacuum them out eventually,
but for now, they can rest there—
small witnesses to the fact that I was here,
that I worked,
that I ate,
that I lived,
even if it was just in crumbs.
For poetry and more, visit Mecella.