Dear Baby Bear,

I hope this letter finds you well.

It was such a pleasure to meet you once again—this time, on the walls of my studio—after a year of gazing at that photograph where you lie next to your owner’s sleeping granny. I hadn’t realized when I became so obsessed with the imagination of your squashy felt body. I don’t know when the flattened, simplified shapes of your legs and hands, your fluffy snout on a round face no bigger than my palm, and your half-cylindrical white ears began to matter more to me than the body of your one-year-old master.

It took me days to choose a surface that could best imitate your fur—something I never actually touched, yet somehow registered in my memory, stored in the snapshots that were meant to help me paint your master’s body.

The red and ochre stripes I sewed you on came from the mother of the girls who adopted your auntie—the big yellow bear, whose long body fur is now rugged, and perhaps once soaked through. I used to be more interested in the faces of these foster parents. But slowly, it was the patterns that began to hold my gaze—like the white polka dots on the red frock of one of the tiny parents who celebrated your auntie’s birthday party.

The dots hypnotized me. They bulged in my eyes, so I bulged them in thread and paint—stuffing and stitching them until they pulsed like the longing in Harvie Krumpet’s index finger, wanting to feel everyone and everything around him…