The Residue of Morning

I keep a small, chipped ceramic saucer in the back of my cupboard, a remnant of a set that no longer exists. It is stained with the faint, dark rings of coffee consumed years ago, a ghost of a morning ritual that has long since dissolved into the ether of time. We are creatures of habit, building our days around the steam rising from a cup or the quiet scratch of a pen, believing these small anchors will hold us steady against the tide of the inevitable. Yet, the ritual is always temporary. The coffee cools, the smoke clears, and we are left only with the physical evidence of our presence—the ash, the stain, the hollow space where a moment once lived. We spend our lives trying to curate these fragments, hoping that by keeping the debris, we might somehow preserve the feeling of the dawn. Is it the ritual itself we miss, or simply the proof that we were once awake to the world?

Nicole Gilmer has captured this delicate tension in her work titled Art or Breakfast in Paris. It reminds me that even the most fleeting morning habits leave behind a story, if only we are willing to look at what remains. Does your own morning routine leave a mark you choose to keep?