Galena House Publishing.The Versions We Keep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for listening. This was made at Galena House, in Frisco, Colorado.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters