The Woman Who Started It

Black Bear Brand WOMAN, in Josh Sirlin's words.

For years it would not come.

I wanted to make something for a woman. I tried. It never arrived. Everything else I have ever made came the same way, without deciding and without waiting. I see a thing and it pulls me, the way a thing you want pulls you across a room, and I go. I do not think my way into a design. I am taken by it. For a woman, for years, nothing took me. The door stayed shut and I could not find the handle.

Then London. A rooftop. A party. A crowd of interesting people, and not one of them mattered. She was there. From the first moment every part of me was turned toward her and the rest of the city went quiet. I blinked and the party was ending, the crowd thinning toward the stairs. We traded a number in a hurry. Then she was gone.

She was gone for one day. Dinner the next night. A walk to the train. We talked about her coming to see me in the States, and then she said, why not stay a few more days and come see the English countryside. A kiss. Gone again, and again only for a moment. I changed my flight without thinking. Two days later I was with her, out in the green quiet of the country, where I had planned to spend one night and no more.

At the station she dropped me off. A kiss. A goodbye. And at the last second she stepped onto the train with me, back to London for one last night before I flew home. The fourth goodbye was the one that held.

By then it was already lit. The designs were chasing me now, not the other way round. Love, maybe. I am not sure. For a moment it was beyond question, and forever, and I cannot say. What I can say is that it was alive, and it was awful in the way only alive things are, and I would not trade it. The switch had been thrown. I could not not make. The storm ran six months. It lit a flame that had been sitting cold for what felt like my whole life.

It began as what I pictured for her. To make for her. To see on her. To give to her. The love got away from me. The mark she left did not. She is the muse, and the chase, and the dream, and she is the reason the door finally opened.

This is where it comes from. This is Black Bear Brand WOMAN.

A Way Of Life.