Same Beanie

“Someone was walking in front of me wearing the same beanie.

It looks better on me.

I drew her so you could see.”

-Jamie, cheekily chortling on the other side of a phone call

Jamie called me after his walk into work from the Ferry Building in San Francisco. . . . or maybe he called me during, then drew her later at his desk and sent me a picture of his post-it beside his beanie . . .

Jamie would describe moments of flow state when he was playing guitar. The experience of all other things falling silent as you are swept up wholly immersed in the act of doing the thing. I have been sitting on these prints and this half-baked video for several months. The state of flow I had found in moments during the carving, printing or editing I lost when I sat with it all as a whole. I could not see if it reflected the love I had wanted to share, could not anticipate its reception. Would you see that laughing and especially laughter at myself brings me closer to Jamie? that finding flow there helps me sink into an out of body presence in the all pervading supermassive void pulling at me? How much did I actually expect this silly video to convey?

Would you laugh with me and feel Jamie too?

All the mistakes I was slow to catch, the realization of the delightful awkwardness of the image, and the lack of artfulness I saw in the video amounted to what I knew then and feel again now but hadn’t for all those months is that while not skillfully crafted it is real, like Jamie and me, and that is all that matters. And while I struggle to be the person I aspire to be, I am who I am now, a work in progress.

In flow I find Jamie. I am transported into our love. It feels like home.

…As for the rainbows, the wish for you to walk in them… I’ve struggled with that message a lot recently.

What does that mean? whose voice is that? is it my voice?

There is a crisis of identity not having Jamie beside me and having to let people see only me, it’s terrifying and I feel naked and broken and made to stand without my person. I love standing beside Jamie, watching him shine in his lovingly confident way. I feared the rainbow danced near to all the horrible platitudes, the messages that I would be transformed, a phoenix rising from the ashes as if I needed immeasurable and irrevocable loss to be a better human, the well meaning messages that only shamed me in the loss of all that I loved and the dream of our life. I’ve hidden away when I really wanted to scream all the pain from the greatest depths and cast it across the expanse of space and time as an expression of the ineffable magnitude of love.

I know Jamie loved for me to shine too.

But damnit it would help if I were funny, less quietly whimsical.

My intention and hope is that you feel a message of love from Jamie and me. A wish that you find presence and pause to feel the beauty in the world, that you can laugh at yourself and also see the absurdity in things. We all know pain, it is inevitable, and I never intend to leave you platitudes. I am human. I struggle to see the beauty of life most days but I do not seek to escape pain, I sit with it. Sometimes I move with it. Sometimes I put on my technicolor glasses. When I can dive into the flow of Jamie and my love I find home.

I hope you have somewhere you find flow, I wish for you to walk in rainbows, Friends.

Embrace mistakes, take chances, find presence in being uncomfortable. Maybe these are innate predispositions of Jamie’s… maybe we learned them together… I don’t really know. Either way, I carry these lessons as a gift from Jamie and I am trying to live by them more deliberately among other tenets of a life artfully survived as I aim to find a state of flow.

And when you find that you have made a bunch of unintentionally rude art, just awkwardly wink or cheekily chortle and send it off -

-with love

Natalie&Jamie

P.S. NarWeiss… there is a story if you are confused or interested. Jamie and I talked about creating a new surname for ourselves to share rather than following the patriarchal tradition, me taking his name. He, mostly jokingly, said maybe he would take my name but that didn’t fit us either. I suggested “Narweiss”. Jamie did not exactly jump at yes, but he did not say no either, he laughed. I’m running with it because I like it.