[gentle music]
A small note before we begin. This is a
personal podcast. I tell these stories as
I remember and understand them, from my
own life and perspective. When other
people wander into them, I protect what
belongs to them.
Some details are changed or left out for
that reason. These are my words. My
memories. And tonight, a letter.
All right. Come in. It is already warm.
There is pumpkin bread cooling about
twenty feet from where I am sitting.
The whole place smells like cinnamon and
warm sugar, and the particular sweetness
pumpkin gets when it has been in an oven
long enough to stop smelling like pumpkin
and start smelling like October.
There is music on, low. A lamp. A book
open beside me that I am not reading. And
there is a letter.
My first letter from a listener. It came
to the inn, by post, addressed to the name
you know me by. It is on the desk while I
say this.
I am not going to read it to you. It
belongs first to the person who sent it.
But I have read it several times. Of
course I have.
And somewhere around the second reading,
something occurred to me that I have been
turning over all day. The letter is
another version of me.
[a low hum]
Somebody I have never met has listened to
my voice, and heard these stories, and
noticed something, and formed an Avery in
their mind. Then they wrote to him.
He is me. He is not all of me. He belongs
partly to them.
And I find that I can hold it. Which is
new. Because the first time I learned that
another person could keep an entirely
different version of someone I loved, I
was ten, and it frightened me half to
death.
[fire crackling]
It was a notebook. Small. Black. The kind
of object a child knows, before he has
touched it, does not belong to him. This
has never reliably stopped a child from
opening one.
Inside was somebody I loved. Her name was
on the pages. She had been at some of the
same dinners. There were pieces I
recognized. But the woman on those pages
had been assembled from grievances, and
suspicions, and things remembered one way
instead of another.
Every page seemed to hold some new account
of something she had supposedly done. And
I remember being horrified.
Not by what it said. By the fact that
somebody believed it. That was the part I
could not make sense of. I knew her. And
here was a person who also knew her,
writing about someone I had never met.
I think something in me split open that
day. Not dramatically. Nobody found me on
the floor clutching a notebook while
thunder cracked outside. Childhood is
rarely that courteous to writers.
I closed it. I put it back. The house
continued. Dinner probably happened.
Someone asked me something ordinary.
But I had learned a fact I would spend the
rest of my life writing around. Someone
will always have a different version than
you.
[fire crackling softly]
At ten, that was danger. If somebody
misunderstood you, you corrected them. If
somebody believed something untrue, you
found the evidence. There had to be an
explanation precise enough to put the room
back the way it was.
I became very good at explanation. I
became even better at presentation.
A life can get surprisingly far on
presentation. A smile. A useful pair of
hands. A well set room. A person who
remembers. A person who arrives before he
is asked.
A person who can make something difficult
easier without making a show of the labor.
Good Little Innkeeper spends a lot of time
with this part of me. It gives the watcher
a desk, and lets him keep records.
And it understands something I only worked
out by writing it. That I have always been
able to hold two accounts of a person at
the same time, without forcing either one
to disappear.
[a low hum]
The oldest example is a boy on a bicycle.
He would come up the road and the day
would change. We built things. We planned
things. We spent the kind of afternoons
children believe are structurally
permanent.
My best friend in the whole wide world.
That is the phrase. I would not improve it
now. Adults say best friend and
immediately start placing invisible
footnotes around the claim. Children say
the whole wide world and mean the whole
wide world.
I would have done anything for him. I know
that, because I did.
And he could be horrible. That is also
true.
In the book, I finally let those two
sentences sit beside each other. The best
friend in the whole wide world. Horrible.
It does not acquit one with the other. It
does not prosecute him either. It simply
keeps the page open.
The child I was saw more than people
assume children see. He saw the kindness.
He saw the cruelty. He saw when something
hurt. And the love continued anyway. The
seeing and the loving lived in the same
body. Neither cancelled the other.
I used to think that was something I
should cure. I do not anymore. I think I
should understand it. That is different.
[fire crackling]
People want a bad guy. I have discovered
this repeatedly since I started writing
books.
A relationship ended? Who did it. You were
hurt? By whom. You were disappointed? Who
failed you. There should be a chair at the
front of the room where we put the guilty
person, so the rest of the furniture can
be arranged around him.
It is efficient. A villain solves a great
many structural problems. A victim does
too. Here is the one who suffered. Here is
the one who caused it. Now we all know
where to stand.
I understand why stories work that way. I
also know my life does not.
I have been through a lot. I do not need
to make it prettier than it was. There
were years I would not volunteer to
repeat. There were rooms I should have
left sooner.
There were people I expected things from
because I had confused my own devotion
with an agreement they never signed.
There were nights I made myself smaller.
There were mornings I stood back up.
And I have hurt people too. I have
misunderstood. I have projected. I have
made whole futures out of beginnings. I
have been wrong.
This is a terrible foundation for a victim
story. Everybody keeps wandering out of
position.
[fire crackling softly]
And now I am flourishing. That sentence
matters to me, so I am going to say it
plainly and not decorate it.
Not surviving beautifully for the camera.
Not bravely carrying on. Not rebuilding
myself from rubble while the music swells
underneath. Flourishing.
My world gets bigger almost every day. I
am writing. I am making music. I am
building things. A stranger sent me a
letter because something I made reached
them.
There are books on this desk that do not
exist because somebody rescued me. They
exist because I made them. There is a
whole world called Galena House that began
as something internal, and now it has
doors, and I keep opening them.
That is not the ending the clean victim
story wants. The clean victim story wants
vindication.
I do not want vindication. I want
authorship. Vindication still leaves the
other person holding the pen. Authorship
is taking it back.
I think the little black notebook taught
me that long before I could have said it.
Somebody else can write the person you
love. Somebody else can write you. They
can take the same afternoon and make an
entirely different room out of it. They
are allowed.
The mistake is believing their room
replaces yours. It does not. And mine does
not replace theirs either. That one is
harder.
Because my version is still a version.
Being the one telling the story does not
make me the neutral camera. I have angles.
I have lighting. I have memory, which is
one of the least neutral things I know.
It keeps strange evidence. I can forget an
entire month and remember exactly how
somebody held a fork at one dinner fifteen
years ago. I can forget what I said, and
remember precisely what changed in the
other person's face after I said it.
[a low hum]
That is the material I carry. I collect
the beautiful pieces of people. Not
beautiful people. Some of them have been
complete disasters. Pieces.
A sentence. A gesture. A way of laughing.
The first person who showed me how to do
something correctly. The person who put a
hand on my shoulder once, when I did not
know I needed one.
The person who said my name in a way I
have not heard it said since. The person
who taught me a song. The person who hurt
me, and who also, one Wednesday afternoon,
was extraordinarily kind.
I remember Wednesday. This is where people
sometimes lose me. They want Friday to
revise Wednesday.
Friday was terrible, Avery. Yes. I know. I
was there. Wednesday was still beautiful.
I was there too.
I refuse retroactive ugliness.
That may be one of the central rules of my
life now. If something was beautiful when
it happened, I will not call it ugly later
simply because it failed to last.
If somebody was kind to me once, I will
not rewrite the kindness because the rest
of it ended.
If I loved you, I loved you. Past tense is
not an accusation. It is tense.
[fire crackling]
I will love you until I don't.
I have been turning that sentence over all
day, and I know it sounds colder than I
mean it. I think that is because we have
made forever the only respectable
measurement for love.
I do not believe that anymore. Forever is
an extraordinary weight to put on a
feeling. I would rather tell the truth.
I love you. Now. Fully. Without making the
present prove that it owns the future.
And if one day I do not? Then I do not. I
am not going to turn you into a monster so
the absence of love makes sense. I am not
going to turn myself into a victim so I
can leave with a cleaner conscience.
I am not going to walk backward through
the years removing every warm thing
because the last room was cold. I will
keep what was beautiful. I am very good at
keeping things.
[fire crackling softly]
This is not always charming. I have old
notes. I have photographs. I have
sentences stored in places no filing
system would ever find.
And I have people who have not been in my
life for years who still turn up in some
small motion of my hand. Somebody lives in
the way I make a certain kind of coffee.
Somebody lives in a song.
Someone lives in the fact that I notice
the quiet person at a table. Someone is in
a recipe. Someone is in a phrase I use so
naturally now that I no longer remember
when it became mine.
People become structural. That is
different from staying, and it took me a
long time to understand the difference. I
thought carrying somebody meant keeping
access. If the relationship did not
remain, something had failed.
But people can stay in the architecture
after they have left the house. That is
not haunting. It is inheritance. It is
being human.
The boy on the bicycle is in the original
architecture of my loyalty. The book
traces that early love forward into a man
who gives without keeping a strict ledger
of what comes back.
Who can see a person's failures and still
keep the fondness as something separate.
[a low hum]
That trait has cost me. Of course it has.
Anything powerful enough to make a life
will eventually send you an invoice.
I have given too much. I have stayed too
long. I have loved people in ways that
made their comfort easier and my own life
harder. I have thought, if I make myself
indispensable enough, perhaps leaving me
will become impossible.
Very elegant theory. Terrible field
results.
But even that deserves more tenderness
than I used to give it. I was not a fool
for loving hard. I was not weak for
staying. I was doing what I knew. And
love, for me, has almost always moved into
matter.
I make things. That is where the feeling
goes. Into coffee. Into rooms. Into books.
Into music. Into letters. Into food. Into
a whole small world arranged carefully
enough that somebody else might step
inside and feel something before I have to
explain it.
The book finally names this as one of the
mechanics of Elias. When something pulls
him, the feeling becomes construction.
Timber, cups, cinnamon, type, whatever can
hold the current.
Then he stands at the edge of what he made
and asks the question that has followed me
most of my life.
Did it reach you?
That question has built beautiful things.
It has also nearly worn me out. Did it
reach you. Did I do enough. Was the room
warm enough. Should I explain it again.
Should I give more. Should I stay. Should
I fix it.
There comes a point where love that has
been given a job stops being love's fault.
The job is the problem. I am learning to
take the job away.
[fire crackling]
I will still give. I do not think that
part of me is going anywhere, and I hope
it does not. I like that I notice. I like
that I remember.
I like that somebody can tell me one small
thing and months later I can hand it back
to them as proof that I heard.
I like feeding people. I like letters. I
like making a thing more beautiful than it
strictly needs to be. I like leaving a
lamp on. I like the ridiculous effort.
That is me.
But giving is not surrender. Remembering
is not consent. Forgiveness is not access.
Love is not a lifetime appointment.
Those distinctions have made me softer,
not harder. I was afraid they would do the
opposite. I thought boundaries would
bleach all the warmth out of me. I thought
the only choices were endless availability
or coldness.
That was another false pair. The world is
full of them. Victim or villain. Stay or
betray. Forgive or remember. Love or
leave. But a human life is mostly the
space between two supposedly opposite
things.
I can remember and forgive. I can love and
leave. I can see exactly what someone did
and still remember the beautiful thing
they once gave me. I can stop loving
someone, and refuse to humiliate the
version of myself who once did.
That last one matters. We look backward
with information the earlier person did
not have, and we call him foolish. How
could you not see it? He did see it.
Sometimes we see exactly what is happening
and stay anyway. Because seeing and loving
are not opposites.
The boy on the bicycle taught me that
before I could do long division. The
notebook taught me the other half. Seeing
is not ownership either. Nobody in that
house possessed the whole woman. Not the
one writing. Not the child reading. Not
the woman herself.
I think that is why my writing has become
less interested in verdicts. Verdicts
close the file. I like the file open. That
is where people are. Not in the sentence
that explains them. In the two sentences
that refuse to reconcile.
[fire crackling softly]
The letter on the desk is doing something
gentler than the notebook did. It is
showing me the version of myself that
reached somebody.
That moves me. Not because it proves I am
good. I am less interested in proving that
now. It moves me because it proves there
was contact. Something travelled.
I sat somewhere and spoke. Another person
heard. They carried something. Then they
wrote back. And now I am carrying
something of them.
Last time, I said that somebody else was
hearing this, somewhere you will never be,
and that the thread was populated. This
week the thread wrote back.
That is the transaction I want. Not fame.
Not an audience. An audience is a room
where everybody faces the same direction.
I want a house. People coming through
different doors. Somebody leaving a
sentence on the table. Someone else
bringing a song. A loaf cooling in the
kitchen. A person in a chair saying
something they did not expect to say.
[a low hum]
I need to say this carefully, because it
is easy to mistake the name for a
building. Tonight, Galena House is this
room. The private one. Mine.
A computer open. Fragments of music.
Books. The letter. The bread. There is
almost certainly a cup somewhere I should
have taken to the sink.
I do not want this room too polished. I
have spent enough of my life making rooms
beautiful for other people. This one gets
to look lived in.
That may be the most important thing I am
building now. A world that does not
disappear if somebody leaves it.
For years, so much of me existed
relationally. Useful to whom. Loved by
whom. Needed where. Even my imagination
leaned outward. Who is coming. What will
they need. How can I make it beautiful
before they arrive.
Galena House has slowly become the
opposite question. What remains when
nobody comes?
Me. Apparently.
And I like him. More than I expected. He
is funny. He is difficult. He notices too
much. He can make a myth out of a receipt
if you give him ten minutes and decent
lighting. He has made some spectacular
mistakes.
He has also built an extraordinary life
out of material other people might have
thrown away.
[fire crackling]
But there is one thing he has to be
careful of, and the letter is testing it
tonight. This happened. I thought it meant
something else would happen next. Those
are different sentences. That may be one
of the hardest things I know.
A beautiful afternoon is not a contract. A
kindness is not a promise. A letter is not
an omen. A person looking at you one way
tonight has not promised to look at you
that way forever.
Imagination hates this. Imagination is
already upstairs picking curtains. Mine
especially. Give me one meaningful moment
and I can build a four act future around
it before breakfast.
I can build whatever I want on the page.
Other people's futures require permits.
So. A letter came. Someone wrote something
powerful to me, and I felt it, and I am
still feeling it. I do not know what comes
next. Maybe another letter. Maybe none.
Maybe they listen for years. Maybe never
again.
None of those futures gets to reduce what
already happened. The letter is on my
desk. I am grateful. That is enough.
There is great peace in enough. I used to
think enough was what you settled for. Now
I think enough might be what remains after
you stop interrogating a good thing about
whether it plans to stay.
[fire crackling softly]
Outside this room, people are keeping
versions of me. I know that. Some will be
kind. Some will not. Some will remember
something I barely remember doing. Some
will read the books and decide who the
villain was.
They can. I am not writing to stop them. I
am writing because I learned, very young,
that a story becomes dangerous when one
version claims it is the only room in the
house.
There should be doors. There should be
windows. There should be another chair.
The version in the notebook. The version
the child was defending. The boy on the
bicycle as beloved. The boy on the bicycle
as horrible. Elias. Avery. The person in
the listener's letter. The person sitting
here reading it.
Same house. Different rooms.
What I will not do anymore is burn one
room down to prove another existed.
That is the new rule. Maybe the most
important one. I can leave the beautiful
part standing. I can leave the painful
part standing too. I do not have to live
in either.
That is what flourishing feels like to me.
Not becoming untouched. Becoming spacious.
Enough room for the record. Enough room
for contradiction. Enough room for people
to leave without taking every version of
me with them.
Enough room to love someone fully and, if
the day comes, stop.
I will love you until I don't. And while I
do, I will mean it. If I stop, I will mean
that too. I will not punish the past for
failing to become the future.
I will not make you evil to make my
leaving noble. I will not make myself
innocent to make the story sell. I will
take what was mine to learn. I will keep
whatever was beautiful.
Then I will come home. Here. To this room.
[silence]
The letter on the desk. The music almost
finished. The loaf cooling nearby.
Something else half written. Another life
beginning somewhere inside the one I am
already living.
When I was ten, I thought the frightening
thing was that somebody could write a
version of a person I loved and believe it
completely.
Tonight I think the beautiful thing is
that no notebook gets the whole person.
Not hers. Not mine. Not yours.
We are larger than the versions. And
still, somehow, we leave pieces of
ourselves in one another.
I think that is enough for me. The pieces.
The beautiful ones especially. I know how
to keep them. I always have.
[fire crackling softly]
The bread is cool enough to cut now,
probably, without destroying the whole
loaf. History suggests I will take the
first slice too early anyway. Some habits
are character.
It is somebody's recipe. Most of mine are.
Somebody is in it, the way somebody is in
the coffee, and every autumn when I make
it they are briefly in the house again.
That is the whole essay, really. Somebody
lives in a loaf of bread.
The recipe is on the site, written for
nine thousand feet, with the sea level
numbers beside it. Less leavening. A
hotter oven. Do not open the door to check
on it. It is not going anywhere, and
neither are you.
I am Avery Lane Maxwell. This is Galena
House Audio. Good Little Innkeeper is
finished, and out looking for its
publisher. Still, by Design. is where the
stillness lives.
Keep the beautiful pieces. Leave the room
ready. Someone is coming. And this week,
apparently, someone wrote back.
[silence]
Thanks for listening. This was made at
Galena House, in Frisco, Colorado.
[music swells softly]