Two Septembers ago, my husband and I sat at a long wooden table built for 12 in a hostel in the middle of Spain. There were only four of us at dinner that night–Ben and I, the owner of the hostel, and a man from Denmark who was volunteering there for the year. The pandemic was still in full swing and, little did we know, would not slow down any time soon. Still, the Camino de Santiago was slowly opening up again to foreigners after over a year of painful silence.

“Why do you need anyone other than your loved ones to read your story?” the man had asked me, meaning well. “If your goal was always to just write it down someday and share it with the people closest to you, then you’ve already accomplished that.”

The question came after explaining that I was in the process of writing my memoir and worried about whether it would please the 10-year-old version of myself that always said I would write it.

“But you did write it,” he argued gently, “Why do you feel lots of people have to read it to prove that?”

Plenty of answers flooded my mind but didn’t make it out of my mouth. To be understood. To feel justified in my sadness. To help other people who went through something similar.

None of these answers felt right for the moment, because in this case, his point of asking the question was to clarify that I’d already reached my childhood goal: to write the story down and connect with people in my life.

As I start on my mish-mash of projects for this week, I keep hearing him in my mind. What is the harm of simply making that initial connection between my brain and the keyboard and the keyboard and a close-knit community?

When I was an actor, the answer was a bit more straightforward. It didn’t matter how many people witnessed the art in creation, it was created nonetheless. I was in a production of The Miracle Worker when I was about eight years old in Piscataway, New Jersey. Our first preview was press night, but it happened to coincide with a rip-roaring snowstorm that sent most people in town running to the grocery stores for bread and milk. And so we had two audience members for our first official performance.

In such a small space–we’re talking maybe 50 seats in the round, if that–performing Helen Keller’s story to two snow-sodden people was a specific type of magic. They knew that every wave of creative energy we flung out into the audience divvied up between the two of them. There was no hiding in the magic of the dark theatre house when there are only two strangers in the room. That performance–that experience–can never happen again. It will always be something passed between us and them.

Why do we require a certain-sized audience for our writing? Live performance knows that the initial connection is enough. If I make that initial connection to the page and then to, say, a handful of people in my life, does that not count as much as that snowy night in Piscataway, NJ? The magic has already been made either way.

Perhaps I’ve lost my analogy here. But I appreciate the kindness behind the wise question from the man at the hostel table. The rest of the dinner conversation meandered through topics with similar weight and care. Ben talked about his writing, the woman who owned the hostel talked about the pain of the pandemic lockdown, and the man from Denmark talked about Buddhism and his inability to stay in one place too long. At the end of the dinner, we washed the dishes together and bid each other goodnight.

It was actually the second time I’d stayed at the hostel. The first time was in 2017 when the table was filled to the brim with hikers exchanging stories through bits of shared language.

I’d hate to end this already melancholy and contemplative post with sad news, but that hostel burned down about a month ago. A friend who now lives in Spain along the Camino sent me the news. The place means so much to so many. It has been a warm home and a quiet landing place for beautiful conversation for years. The video on the news of the fire shattered me. The table, the benches, the kitchen, the wooden bunk beds–how could I picture them up in flames? A sacred space, gone.

I sure hope the community rallies around the owner and that they are able to rebuild, but I also remember that the sudden end to that version of the building does not negate the magic that existed before the fire. The conversation we had still happened. The story was still written down. There were still two people in the audience. We still used the time and the creative power that we had. And that sure does mean something.