First off:

There’s eight Fidget Pens, one Mistral, and one Artemis in Impressionist’s Spring in the shop. The Bebes are coming in April, as well as the Retrogrades. (I wanted to make sure I had enough Bebes for all the Bebe Quarterly subscribers before releasing them into the shop.)

And off we go.

I have told myself that I wouldn’t send a newsletter about a shop update without an actual letter to go with it. I told myself that I would say something to you, that I wouldn’t just slide into the digital seat next to you and show you what I made without anything else to go with it.

Except, sometimes, that is all you have to offer. There are periods in life when you are just that: absorbed in the work of living life, present in the routines and patterns that you no longer need to explain or have understood through words.

And yet.

And yet, sometimes, there is an all too human ache under that quiet contentment. Some feathered whisper of an echo reminding you that, while maybe you don’t need the words, there is still an ache once in a while to not be moving through time alone. To be witnessed, to know you exist in time in someone else’s eyes. Sometimes what you find yourself aching for – aching for, but don’t quite know how to ask for, not without seeming all too strange – is to sit in silence with someone. You know, maybe occasionally showing each other something you found on your phone or smiling at each other from across the living room when you catch each other’s eyes when one of you passes through the room. Not words, not entertainment – companionship without performance, without expectations, without having to be anything other than present.

I have found, often, that all of our words and conversations and activities are a veneer – the lacquer, the ornamentation, the superficial trappings we adorn our hope-chest-rib-cages with, all in hopes of making our heartbeat in the silence when sitting next to each other tolerable. Maybe if we drown out the sound of our heartbeat, we won’t be quite so impossible to sit next to, and then maybe we won’t find ourselves quite so alone.

And yet.

What I want most is to know your heartbeat is there, comforting, and beating in time with mine – and for that to be enough for you, too.

-A. Markov