Galena House Publishing.Where Elias Goes to Write.
the first Sunday Room
I took six minutes through Frisco the other evening. That is not a figure of speech. Six minutes, on a bicycle, from the footbridge, left toward the post office, down Main Street, to the Frisco Lodge. That was the whole trip. And the town was doing the thing it does for about fifteen minutes in October, where everything turns the color people spend the rest of the year trying to manufacture. Gold in the trees. Gold caught on the buildings. Gold on the creek. The mountains already going dark behind it. And I had a very strange thought. I know this place. Not the way a tourist knows a place after three days and a very successful brunch.
I know which corners hold the snow late. I know which windows catch the morning first. I know where the road changes under the tires, and what Main Street looks like before anyone is awake. I know what the town sounds like when it is full, and what it sounds like when everybody has gone home. I know people here. I know versions of people here. And they know versions of me. That may be the more important part. Because I am moving on. Not from Frisco, exactly. Not from everything. From a chapter that has been large enough that, for a while, I mistook it for the whole book.
I think we all do that. A place holds us long enough, and we begin to believe it owns the definition. This is who I am here. This is what happened here. This is what this place meant. And then, quietly, underneath: please do not rearrange anything after I leave.
That last part is where it gets interesting. I have always believed in leaving a place better than I found it. The sentence lodged in me early, the way the good ones do. Leave the room better. Leave the job better. Leave the table better. Leave the person better, if you can. Put something good into the world before you move through it. I still believe it. But lately I have wondered whether I have sometimes confused leaving a thing better with leaving enough of myself inside it that it cannot forget me. Those are not the same.
I know how to make myself structural. It is an old skill. Give me a place and I will learn it. Give me people and I will notice them. Give me a building and eventually I will know where the spare key is, who needs coffee before conversation, which lamp nobody else remembers to turn on, and which small thing is about to become a large one three hours from now. Useful is a very seductive identity. Especially if, somewhere underneath it, there is still a boy wondering whether usefulness might buy him permanence. If I leave enough good behind, perhaps the room will keep my shape. If I remember enough, perhaps nothing important can be lost. If I explain it carefully enough, perhaps nobody can misunderstand it.
I have spent a good deal of my life on that last one. Protecting what I know. Not the facts, exactly. The versions. The version of a person I knew when they were good to me. The version of a friendship before it became complicated. The version of a house when everybody was still inside it. And the version of myself who made a decision before he knew what it would cost. I keep them. All of them. There are days I can still walk into perfectly. I know the light. I know where the furniture was. I know what somebody said, and what they meant by it. Or at least, I know what I understood them to mean. That distinction has started to matter.
A few episodes ago I talked about the versions we keep, and I have not been able to put the phrase down. Because I do not think we only keep versions of other people. We keep versions of ourselves. And then we defend them. Of course I did that. You do not understand. You had to be there. I know what happened. Sometimes all of that is true. Sometimes we really were the only person standing at our exact angle. But I have begun to wonder why we spend so much of ourselves trying to make our angle become the whole room. Maybe because losing the version feels dangerously close to losing the life.
If I stop defending that friendship as beautiful, was it beautiful? If I admit I was wrong about someone, was the love a fake? If I leave a place, was I wrong to call it home? I used to think yes. Some version of me did. Now I think that is far too much power to hand an ending.
Something can have been home, and then not be. A person can have been wonderful to you, and then not be. You can have meant every word you said in a room you later had to leave. The later truth does not crawl backward and erase the earlier one. And we are so eager to protect ourselves by rewriting. It hurt, so none of it was real. I left, so I never belonged. They disappointed me, so I was a fool to love them. No. Sometimes you were not a fool. Sometimes you were simply there before you knew what came next. Which is most of life.
So I think I am becoming more interested in protecting something else. Not the person. Not the outcome. The honesty of the moment itself. If I loved you, I loved you. If I was happy there, I was happy there. If I believed I would stay, then there was a version of me who believed it completely. I do not need to embarrass him now because he lacked the benefit of hindsight. He was busy living.
I have been thinking about this with The Amber Thread, too, because a portrait is an odd promise. You sit across from another human being and try to catch them in words. And you cannot catch a person. Not really. You can catch a Tuesday afternoon. The way they held a cup. The sentence they said after they thought the conversation was over. What the light did to their face when they talked about their mother. You can catch what you saw. That is different from possessing them. I think good writing knows the difference. Maybe good love does too. This is what I saw. This is what I knew. This is what was true between us while I was standing there. I do not need it to be the whole person, or even the whole story. It was one room, and I was in it. That is enough.
I think this is what I am trying to learn before I leave another place. How to leave it better without turning around every five minutes to check that it is still arranged according to my memory. How to care for something and then let it go on. How to trust that a place does not have to stay mine for what happened there to stay mine.
I reached the Frisco Lodge after six minutes, and that is where I stopped. And there was something almost funny about it. Another house. Of course. A man spends thirty-one years looking for home, and ends up with so many of them he cannot decide which one to miss properly.
Georgia. Montana. Germany. Colorado. A table. A hotel lobby. A friend's kitchen. A garden in Denver. A footbridge. A road. A little room upstairs on Lake Dillon Drive, with a door that locks. Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question all along. Maybe home is not the place you protect from changing. Maybe home is what survives the change. The way you set a table, because somebody once set one for you. The recipe you make differently now. The song someone gave you. The way you notice the quiet person in the room. The sentence you still use. The way you make coffee. The thing another human being left in you, without ever knowing it would stay. That interests me far more than permanence now. Not being kept. Being continued. The small ways we go on in one another.
And that is what I would like Sundays to become. I do not only want to tell you what I know. I want to know what you are carrying. So here is this week's question. Not a large one. Please do not send me your autobiography. I already have one person doing that around here.
What is one beautiful thing you still protect from being rewritten?
Maybe it was a person. Maybe a place. Maybe one afternoon. Maybe a version of yourself nobody else ever understood correctly. Tell me the detail. The small one. Not what the whole thing meant. What you remember. The cup. The shirt. The song. The street. The sentence. The thing that still makes you say: no. That part was real.
I want those. Because maybe connection is not everybody agreeing on what life means. Maybe it is letting another person hand you one true piece of theirs, and saying: I believe you were there. I believe you saw that. Keep it. Write it on paper and keep it, if that is all it needs. Or send it to me, at avery at averylanemaxwell dot com, or by post to Galena House in Frisco. Tell me how you would like it held. Kept between us. Read without your name. Read with it. Nothing you send becomes part of Galena House without your permission, and any answer is allowed to stay private. And with permission, on a later Sunday, a few of those pieces will come back here. Not as advice. Not as confession. Just evidence that other people are carrying rooms too.
That feels like a Sunday to me. A little less performance. A little more table. A story, a question, something warm from the oven, and people coming and going. Nobody required to stay forever. Just long enough to leave something good behind. I still believe in that. Leave it better than you found it. Only now I think better might not mean unchanged. Maybe better means loved while it was yours. And free when it no longer is.
That is harder. It is also, I think, more beautiful. And I am getting there. Six minutes at a time.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters