Regret

Regret, but not for what happened. Regret for what didn't happen, what failed to happen. A whole life could have been lived here. A whole life, opening out of itself like a universe (opening as a universe is said by cosmologists to open from a foam of popping bubbles). You are a placeholder for what might have happened. Your place marks the failure, the non-beginning of things.

I failed … No, it failed. Nothing happened here. Nothing could happen. And your place is to watch over that nothing is happening, to remember it and reflect it back into every other instant. You will watch over what fails to happen in everything that happens.

But then the sense that this watching is undertaken by someone else, further back in me. That everyone bears a watcher of this kind, one who regrets and who watches over regret.