The hungry feast on crumbs

Crumbs.

Portions of feelings.

Slivers of sentences.

A glance.

A foot touches mine.

A long hug.

A look and a smile.

A drunken kiss.

Crumbs of hope are how these are viewed. Crumbs of opportunity. I greedily gather them up, remember them, and cook them into something large enough to sustain me. My crumb castle, meticulously constructed from so many scraps of throw-away moments in the life of another. I feast on these.

A hungry person. A person who is alone. A person who is under-worked. A person with lots of self-flagellating free time. That's me. I greedily hold onto these crumbs and wish them into a reality that alienates me from the people who drop them, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unconsciously. They're all I have in this crushingly lonely and empty place.

All I have are crumbs. I meticulously collect what positive remarks I receive, and arrange them like a series of comic books or baseball cards. How silly and veritably nonexistent these moments in my life are. An outsider may find this whole hobby unhealthy, blown out of proportion, pointless, potentially harmful.

These crumbs are all I have. I hunger for a touch, a look, a feeling, a word. I take what crumbling memories I have of these very things and form them into a convincing picture, a set of motives, a belief in something brighter. But like a religion, it's a matter of followership that legitimizes it. I follow my crumb formed beliefs alone. The person I worship doesn't exist as I've created her from the crumbs. Showing her my crumb cake alienates her. Clutching her hungry pushes her away. My hunger is a threat. My fantasies disturb. My desires go unanswered. My hunger continues. I place my crumb cake in the trash, but I cannot take myself to toss it out for good. That place is familiar. Those events are all too real. I want to believe the way I strung the crumbs together, but its my own coherent agenda. People rarely speak across time, asynchronously. I've created my Frankenstein out of these fleeting moments that confirm my own desires, my own affections, my own infatuations.

It's time to move on. It's time to move out. It's time to get out. It's time to redefine. It's time to quit curating the crumbs. They've damaged too much. They've brought me no tangible results. I have no victories. I have left overs, the tossed-aside products of what, I'm not sure. Perhaps I mistakenly read them as positive signs. It's all I could do. Forgetting them would be sacrificing too much.

They're just crumbs.