when i listened to the anthropologist who was marked by a bear talk something was said about how stories come from the need to connect with our unconscious. and most of the early stories were about people turning into animals or animals into people and becoming hybrid creatures. i think i felt that before with snakes and other wild creatures, but not bear, that's so powerful.

today i thought of geraldine who i last lived with in my dark days toward the end of my time in ukrainian village. she left me, then i left for hyde park, and the next i heard she had died in berkeley in 2018. i think i needed to know the end of her story so i wrote a friend who left his name on the memorial site. now i know she had been doing personal work and playing music with her friend and she had a partner and she died of a brain anomaly in her sleep. when we ended i had been wanting to, and fearful, because she had been through a betrayal and abandonment before, and one day she popped in the kitchen glowing and said she found an apartment. so i was left, but it had to be that way. now i feel better knowing how her story ended, and i feel perhaps she wanted to tell me, though our story ended sadly.