fear & regret

there's an enormous rock out in the desert with a great big old tree half rotten and filled with bees-- we begin to set down on top of the bee tree rock and the bees start to fly up, and I say, I can't do it-- so instead we set down on top of a different enormous rock with a view in all directions and so large it has its own small topography of lumps and hollows. we poke around, scrape loose stone out of a hollow for a place to tuck things safe from wind and possible rain-- it's clear that others have camped here before, but who and when I have no idea.

I've gone to pick up paper for an art project and run into a guy I know from hmc-- he's been working on his own project, a punch & judy type puppet theater and its puppets-- I feel daunted by how much more realized his artistic vision is than mine and how I'll never catch up. I keep taking wrong turns inside the building and accidentally walk into a classroom where the students seem happy and engaged-- they're running the show-- and as I turn right around and back out again in one smooth motion like a pirouette, I hear them laugh-- not unkindly, just with good humor-- behind me.

I'm helping laura move, carrying pieces of disassembled furniture down a flight of stairs when in my clumsiness and haste I hit another one of the people in the eye with the edge of a bed rail and rush down to check how bad it is-- thankfully it's his eyelid rather than the eye proper, and I say how phenomenally lucky we both are and how terribly sorry I am-- he seems somewhat dazed and appalled-- the damage is done, but the bottom line for me is that it could have been much worse, and so I'm grateful.

t. has been visiting, stopping briefly in my rooms on his way somewhere else-- he's preoccupied with preparing for his upcoming trip, and I begin to wonder to myself why I settle for these crumbs. after he's left, I notice he's been painting some object of his own and has left white smears on my nice table. earlier he'd left his backpack in the room, and I couldn't seem to help myself from going through it and sneaking out three objects and secreting them away-- after I'd left the room and gone on elsewhere, I thought better of it, regretted it, dreaded his finding out what I'd done by something I'd left different from how he'd had it-- and I realized that would be the end of the trust and there was no time or way to go back and undo it.