Galena House Publishing.The Conversation Was Still There.
## Episode Seven # THE CONVERSATION WAS STILL THERE.
*A Tuesday evening essay. Read at the pace of a phone call with someone you have not spoken to in two years.*
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A dear friend called me today. We had barely spoken in almost two years. And within thirty seconds, we were talking as though we had spoken yesterday. No ceremony.
No accounting. No careful walk through the missing months. No, so where do we even begin? We simply began.
Or continued. I am not sure which. That distinction has been sitting with me all afternoon. Because there are people with whom silence feels like damage. And then there are people with whom silence is simply silence.
Time passes. Lives get busy. People move into other rooms. The phone does not ring. Then one day it does. You answer. And somehow the conversation has been sitting there the entire time.
Not waiting dramatically. Not hurt. Not accusing you of abandonment. Just there.
The cup still warm enough to pick up. I like people like that.
More and more, I think those are my people. I used to believe loyalty required evidence. Regularity. Presence. Proof. You call. I call. You show up. I show up.
We keep the relationship alive by continually touching it, like something mechanical that might stop if neither of us winds it. Maybe some relationships are like that. Others apparently have better engineering.
You can leave them alone for two years and turn the key and the whole thing starts. Same voice. Same laugh. Same shorthand. Same strange little understanding of who the other person is beneath whatever has happened since.
I do not find that sad. I find it extraordinary. And more than okay by me. That phone call happened on the same day a man brought me a fish.
So it has been a very specific kind of Tuesday. I was cleaning the kitchen this morning. Nothing literary was happening. This is important. There was no beautiful music playing while I contemplated the meaning of my life.
I was cleaning. Someone came in and told me a man was looking for me. Looking for you. Those words always make me curious. I wiped my hands and went to see who it was.
There was a man standing in the dining room. Very handsome. Again, not important to the larger philosophical structure, but I am committed to accuracy. And he had brought me a piece of flounder.
I did not know him well. His parents had stayed a few weeks earlier. He is new to Frisco and had joined them for breakfast every morning while they were here.
I remembered him. His parents had bought three copies of my book. And now here he was, without them, holding fish. He had come looking for me. He offered friendship.
And I gave him this enormous smile. It surprised me. That is the detail I keep returning to. Not the flounder. Not even the handsome man. My own face.
Because I did not prepare the smile. It got there before I did. There are smiles we use because another person deserves one. There are smiles that belong to work.
There are smiles that smooth a room. I know all of them. This was not one of those. This one happened to me. Before I could decide what the moment meant, I was delighted.
That is rarer than it should be. I am a person who can make meaning very quickly. Give me a doorway and I can build a house around it before you finish knocking.
It is useful if you write novels. Slightly more complicated everywhere else. But lately I have been trying to allow things to arrive before I turn them into stories.
A letter. A phone call. A piece of fish. A smile. There. That happened. Let it be itself for a minute. I think Still, by Design. began with this exact instinct, though I did not understand it when I wrote it.
The book pays attention to what happens in the minute before meaning arrives. A cup is poured. A room changes with the light. Someone returns. A letter appears.
Music comes through another room. A person stands by a window. Then, much later, the character catches up. I used to think that was simply the way I liked to write.
I think now it may be the way I live. The world happens first. Avery understands it later. Sometimes much later. Occasionally there is a novel involved. Tonight there are three things on my mind.
The man with the fish. The friend on the telephone. And a letter I received from a listener. My first one. Three people entering my life from three completely different directions.
One new. One old. One I have never met. And every one of them saying, in a different way: I found you. That sentence would have frightened an earlier version of me.
Being found sounds romantic until you have spent enough of your life learning how to disappear correctly. I have always known how to enter another person's world. Learn the room.
Learn the rhythm. Remember the details. Become useful. There is a particular safety in being the person who notices first. You get to remain slightly ahead of the intimacy.
You already know how they take their coffee. They are still learning your last name. You know something is wrong before they have decided whether to tell you.
You can be extraordinarily close to somebody and still maintain this tiny observational distance. One step behind. Watching. Good Little Innkeeper knows that man very well. Still, by Design. knew something else.
It knew the rooms could answer. It knew somebody might take the second cup. It knew that the thing you prepare for another person can eventually become the thing that keeps you company.
I think I am finally living somewhere between those books. I still notice. God, do I notice. I probably always will. But people are beginning to surprise me.
I like that. I did not know this man was coming. I did not know my old friend would call. I did not know a listener would write.
None of those things were on a schedule I could improve. They happened without my help. What an inconvenience. And what a relief. I think I have spent much of my life confusing loyalty with maintenance.
If I loved something, I tended it. Naturally. That is what love did around me. It cooked. It showed up. It remembered. It called. It worried. It brought something.
It did not sit quietly in the corner announcing itself as love. It had work clothes. I understand love that way. Still do. If I care about you, there will probably be food eventually.
This is not metaphor. But my friend today reminded me that some loyalty does not need constant maintenance. It can survive absence. Not neglect. There is a difference.
Absence. Two people live. Things happen. There are other people. Other cities. Other work. Whole seasons no one reports to the other. Then the phone rings. Hello. And the years fold.
Not disappear. Fold. The time still happened. We are not pretending otherwise. But the relationship has some deeper geography than the calendar. You know where to find each other.
Maybe that is what loyalty is for me. Not constant proximity. Knowing the road back. There are people in my life who could call after ten years and I would know the voice before they finished my name.
I do not need to speak to them every Tuesday to know that. I am beginning to trust it. That is new. I used to want proof. I kept emotional receipts.
Not intentionally. I am simply built like a records department with excellent lighting. I know who showed up. I know who did not. I know the sentence. I know what month.
I know what song was playing. I know what I gave. I know what they gave. And for years, somewhere beneath all that remembering, I thought the ledger might eventually explain the relationship.
It never did. Human accounting is terrible. The numbers refuse to cooperate. Someone can give you very little and change your entire life. Someone can give you years and leave almost nothing behind.
A friend can disappear for two years and still know exactly where the conversation was left. A stranger can hand you a fish and somehow give you something much larger.
A person you have never met can write a letter and suddenly there is a new object in your private world that you know you will keep. Try putting that in a spreadsheet.
This is why I write instead. Writing lets contradictory accounts remain on the same page. I learned very young that people have versions. I found a little black notebook when I was maybe ten.
It belonged to an adult in my life. Inside was a version of someone I loved that I barely recognized. Page after page of grievances, suspicions, remembered injuries, things arranged into a person I knew from an entirely different room.
I remember being horrified. Not only by what was written. By the fact that somebody believed it. That rearranged something in me. There will always be another version.
Of the person you love. Of your friend. Of you. Of what happened. Of why it happened. For years I thought the answer was accuracy. Get the story right.
Correct the misunderstanding. Explain enough. Surely if everybody had all the facts, we would eventually meet in the same room. We will not. I know that now. And strangely, knowing it has made me less defensive and more loyal.
Because I no longer need my version of someone to become the official one. My dear friend who called today belongs to people I will never meet. They have versions.
I have mine. The man with the fish already had a version of me before he walked into the room. His parents had talked. He had sat at breakfast.
He had seen me. He had seen the books. Somewhere in all of that, an Avery formed. Then he came looking for him. And met me. I find that beautiful.
Not because his version will be accurate. It will not. No one's is. Mine included. But connection does not require total accuracy. Thank God. If it did, nobody would ever love anybody.
You get pieces. The way they laugh. The sentence they use too often. How they behave when tired. What happens to their face when they receive something they did not expect.
You collect enough pieces and call it a person. Then the person surprises you. If you are lucky, you allow the surprise. I think that is one of the great mistakes we make in long relationships.
We stop permitting revision. We decide who somebody is and then become irritated when they continue being alive. The person changes. Or we do. And suddenly our beautiful private edition of them is out of date.
I do not want to do that anymore. I want loyalty without fossilization. I want to be able to say: I knew you then. I know you now.
Those do not have to be the same knowledge. Maybe that is why the call today felt so lovely. We did not spend an hour trying to restore the old versions.
We simply talked. The friendship was not preserved in amber. It was alive. That is what I want this podcast to become. Alive. I wrote Still, by Design. as a novel, but I think some part of me was building a room I could eventually step into myself.
The book is full of mornings. Light. Coffee. Music low enough to become part of the room instead of occupying it. Letters. People arriving. People returning. People sitting together without needing to solve the entire history before finishing the cup.
I understand that differently now. Maybe connection is not the absence of distance. Maybe it is what remains available across it. A friend calls. The conversation is still there.
A family leaves. Their son comes back. A listener finishes an episode. Days later a letter appears. This is the living version. Not a character looking through a window.
Me. Tonight. My phone on the desk. The letter nearby. A piece of flounder now occupying an unexpectedly important place in the day's emotional inventory. Music playing. Frisco outside.
Galena House around me, though I do not mean a building when I say that. I mean the room I have been building inside my own life. A place where everything I have carried can finally sit down.
The books live here. The people live here too, in pieces. My grandmother in a recipe. Georgia in the table. Montana in distance. Germany in water. Colorado in light.
Old friends in phrases I have forgotten I borrowed. People who disappointed me in things they still taught me. People I no longer speak to in gestures I will probably make for the rest of my life.
This does not make me trapped in memory. I used to worry about that. It makes me assembled. We are all assembled. That is what a self is.
Parts arrived from everywhere. Someone taught you to hold the knife like that. Someone showed you that song. Someone broke your heart and accidentally improved your taste in books.
Someone loved you at nineteen and gave you a word you still use. Someone who does not know you anymore is responsible for the way you make eggs.
There is comedy in this if you look closely. We walk around believing ourselves to be individuals while carrying a small town's worth of other people's habits. I love that.
I want to carry people. I just no longer think carrying means dragging. That distinction matters. I can carry the beautiful thing someone gave me without carrying the entire relationship forever.
I can keep the memory without keeping the access. I can love somebody across two years of silence without feeling betrayed by the silence. I can pick up the phone when they call.
Hello. There you are. Where were we? There is a generosity in that kind of friendship. No punishment. No invoice. No performance of injury to prove the relationship mattered.
We mattered. The time passed. Both true. Let's talk. I want more relationships like that. And perhaps, if I am honest, I want to become more like that.
A person people can return to without fear of being charged interest on the absence. That does not mean allowing everyone back. No. I have finally learned the lock works too.
There are doors I will not reopen. There are people I can love in memory and not in practice. There are versions of me that belonged to certain relationships and can remain there.
But there are others where the thread was never cut. It just went slack. Today someone picked it up. I felt it immediately. That is loyalty. Not ownership.
Recognition. I know you. You know me. We can begin here. The same thing happened this morning in a smaller, newer way. The man standing in the dining room did not know me deeply.
Maybe he will. Maybe he will not. I am resisting the urge to write Chapter Two before Chapter One has finished cleaning the kitchen. Progress. But there was recognition.
He had been there. He remembered. He returned. He brought something. I received it. I smiled. That is enough for the page. I think Still, by Design. understood enough long before I did.
It keeps returning to small things. A cup. A note. A song. Someone coming through a doorway. A hand on a railing. A room changing as the day moves across it.
The book's emotional life is rarely in the declaration. It is in the evidence that somebody was paying attention. That is my language. Attention. I know how to say I love you with attention.
I know how to say I missed you with memory. I know how to say I am glad you are here with food. Apparently other people know this language too.
One of them speaks flounder. Who knew. I think this is what has shifted in my life lately. For years I was transmitting. Giving. Making. Anticipating. Trying to put enough warmth into the world that perhaps some of it would reflect back.
Now things are arriving. The listener's letter. The phone call. The fish. People finding the books. People finding the podcast. People finding me. I am still learning how to stand still for that.
Receiving asks something different from me. There is no task. No problem to solve. Somebody says, I thought of you. And there is nowhere to hide. Thank you.
That's it. I have historically preferred a more complicated assignment. But maybe this is the next part. Stillness was never merely being quiet. I know that now. Stillness is not immediately turning the moment into labor.
Not making the friendship earn its return. Not asking the gift what it means. Not asking the letter where it is leading. Not asking a smile to become a promise.
Let it arrive. Let yourself be pleased. Then keep living. That may be Still, by Design. now. Not Elias. Avery. Not the perfectly arranged room. The lived-in one.
Computer open. Music half-finished. An old friend back on the phone. A new friend perhaps beginning. A listener's handwriting on the desk. Dinner still undecided, although there is a strong flounder candidate.
And me in the middle of it. Not waiting to become someone. Not leaving. Not trying to prove the place saved me. Here. I like here. That is perhaps the simplest thing I can tell you tonight.
I like my life. I have worked very hard to be able to say that without immediately qualifying it. I like my life. It is strange. It is busy.
It occasionally produces fish. There are disappointments in it. There are people missing from it. There are people returning to it. There are people just entering. There is still too much I want to make.
There are still things I get wrong. But increasingly, when something beautiful happens, I am there when it happens. That may be the greatest change. I do not always experience my life from one step behind anymore.
Sometimes I am inside it. A man surprises me and I smile before I can observe the smile. My phone rings and my friend's voice is suddenly there, and two years becomes yesterday without either of us asking permission.
I read a letter and let myself understand that someone heard me. These sound like small things. They are small things. That is exactly why I trust them.
I have had enough grand gestures. Grand gestures are talented actors. They know where the light is. I trust the friend who simply calls. The person who remembers.
The man with the fish. The listener who buys a stamp. The person who returns and does not announce the return as a moral event. They just walk back into the room.
Those are my people. I think they always have been. Perhaps the whole book was about that. Not healing. Not even stillness. Recognition. The second cup exists because someone might come.
The light is left on because somebody knows the road back. The room is cared for because care itself is meaningful, even before anyone arrives. And when they do arrive, you do not have to ask the moment to become forever.
You can simply say: There you are. I am glad you came. Tonight the music is low. The day is nearly over. My friend's call is still somewhere in me, warm in the way an old song is warm after you hear the first few notes.
The letter is here. The flounder is real. I checked. And the strangest thing is that none of these connections requires me to chase it. That word matters.
I have chased places. People. Versions of myself. Belonging. Recognition. The next thing. I am tired of chasing what knows my address. Maybe loyalty is trusting that the real things know how to return.
Maybe friendship is not measured by the silence between calls but by what happens when one of you finally makes one. Maybe connection is less fragile than I gave it credit for.
Maybe I am too. I do not know. This is Tuesday evening. We are allowed to leave a few things unanswered. But I know this: A friend called me today after almost two years.
We laughed like it had been yesterday. A man came looking for me this morning and brought a piece of fish. Somewhere there is a person who wrote me a letter because something I said reached them.
And tonight I am sitting inside a life I once would have been too busy arranging to notice. I notice it. That is enough. The conversation was still there.
So was I. I think that is what I mean when I say still, by design. Not untouched. Not unmoved. Not alone. Still here. And increasingly, wonderfully, not by myself.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters