The view from the fifteenth floor was real.
There are photographs we take because we want to remember something. And then there are photographs that become meaningful for reasons we couldn't possibly have anticipated when we took them.
This one belongs to the second category.
In December 2022, I traveled to Denver, Colorado, for work-related training. Travel had long been part of my life, and hotel rooms were familiar places—temporary homes in cities where I might spend a few days before packing up and heading somewhere else.
My room was on the fifteenth floor of a downtown hotel.
Outside the window, snow covered the streets and rooftops. I could look out across the surrounding buildings and watch the city carrying on beneath me. I took a photograph of the view, much as I had photographed countless skylines, mountains, and city streets during other trips.
At the time, it was simply another photograph from another work trip.
But something happened during that visit that would eventually lead me to write The Life We Never Lived.
The night before
I was in Denver for training. Someone else was in the city for an entirely different reason: he lived there.
We didn't know one another, and neither of us had any reason to believe that our separate trips would become connected.
Then, on the evening of December 20, we matched on a dating app.
We started messaging that night.
The conversation continued the following morning, and eventually we made plans to meet in person.
There was a coffee shop just a few blocks from my hotel. It was close enough to be convenient, and it became the place where we would meet for the first time on December 21, 2022.
A dating app match. A conversation that carried over into the following day. Two people meeting for coffee in a city.
Those details weren't invented for the novel.
They really happened.
Where the fiction begins
When you read the opening chapters of The Life We Never Lived, some of this will sound familiar.
In the novel, Wes travels to Denver for work. While staying in a downtown hotel, he matches with Luis on a dating app. They begin exchanging messages, and their conversations eventually lead to a meeting at a nearby coffee shop.
That basic sequence came directly from my own experience.
Of course, the novel isn't a transcription of real life. Conversations have been written and rewritten, timelines and circumstances have been adjusted, and fictional material has been woven throughout the story.
Wes and Luis are characters in a novel, and though they are heavily inspired by real people, they are not exact reproductions of those people, even though the character Wes represents myself.
But the circumstances that bring them together have a remarkably real foundation.
The work trip was real.
The dating app match was real.
The messages were real.
And the coffee shop was real, too.
A photograph I never expected to matter
I've taken plenty of pictures from hotel windows over the years. Most are ordinary snapshots that eventually disappear among the thousands of images stored on my phone.
This one survived.
Not because it's an extraordinary photograph. There are certainly better pictures of downtown Denver, and probably better views from other hotel rooms.
But I know exactly which trip it came from.
I know why I was there, and I know who I met.
When I began writing The Life We Never Lived, I returned to that December trip as the starting point for Wes and Luis's story.
The hotel room became part of the novel. So did the winter cityscape, the dating app conversation, and the meeting that followed.
Looking at this photograph now, I see a city covered in snow, photographed from fifteen floors above the street.
I also see the setting of a story that, at the time, I had no idea I would ever write.
The photograph hasn't changed.
But it's no longer just a picture of Denver.
The real fragment: A photograph taken from my fifteenth-floor hotel room during a December 2022 work trip to Denver.
Its place in the fiction: The opening of The Life We Never Lived, when Wes arrives in Denver for work and begins communicating with Luis before their first meeting.
Behind the Fragments explores the real experiences, photographs, and objects that inspired parts of The Life We Never Lived. The novel is a work of fiction, and names, timelines, dialogue, circumstances, and other details may, or may not, have been changed or fictionalized.
