I stood on the porch in the dark with two suitcases and a weak flashlight I had bought at a gas station forty miles back, and the door would not open. For a long moment I simply stood there listening to the lake.
The water moved against the dock my grandfather built when I was seven, the same dock where he taught me to tie a knot properly and told me that patience was not just waiting, but knowing what you were waiting for. I had not understood him then.
At thirty-eight, divorced twelve days earlier and four hours north of the life I had just lost, with damp pine needles gathering at my boots and cold water breathing up from the shore, I still wasn’t sure I did.
The porch light was dead. The flashlight flickered in my hand and made the cabin siding look like old bones under skin. I set the suitcases down and tried the padlock again, though I already knew it wouldn’t turn.
The metal had gone past rust and into identity. Behind me the road had disappeared so completely into darkness it no longer looked like a road at all, only a black idea vanishing into trees.