The Cabin [in progress, comments welcome]

"How do people know?" he wondered, watching the couples around them dissolve. Not how they knew it was over, but how they knew it was time to leave.

"Live with someone long enough and it builds things around you: relationships to people, to places - like rooms in a house; you could live in them for years even after the central fire had gone out. Opening the door to go, that took something else."

Meg and him had married in their late twenties - early enough to be young active parents for their children. In many ways they had got where they wanted to be. They successfully negotiated the stresses of two young academics looking for work (where the odds of finding jobs in the same city were about even with the chances of seeing a rainbow in a hurricane) and raised two self-confident girls.

Sometimes at night they pulled the covers up over their cooling bodies and wondered at how solid they were while so many of their friends from University were now starting over, the divorced and the newly single. But at some point they stopped dreaming together. They achieved, but didn't create new directions to hold them together once they had lived through the course they had charted in the early years of love. Or maybe that was too complicated. Looking back sometimes he wasn't sure; "maybe we just got tired of playing the game of being in love and let the ball fall to the ground."

A distance grew. He first started to get the impression that he was a visitor or tenant in their relationship. And, a little while later, he found the island and the cabin. He'd begun cruising the on-line real estate adds during quiet moments at work. Driving 'round to see the occasional place on Saturday afternoons while Meg did pilates of bikram yoga or whatever fitness fad of the moment kept her so slim, while he paunched over into his forties. He admitted later that it had all been voyerism and escapism when he started. The realestate agent's smile would blind him at the door, but though the glare you could just about make out still how other people lived.

Sometimes the owners were still there even: children's socks cropping out from under the couch and throwing off the agent's obsessive ordering of everything. That sense of life was all he was after in those early visits and he would go home refreshed, knowing that all relationships weren't like his. That other ways of being were out there.

He would try to bring that sense of possibility home with him. Sometimes he managed to carry it along for several days - changing odds and ends in their routines. But more often than not it would get checked at the door, whithered away by the sound of the television that always greeted him when he arrived. Increasingly he realized that he wanted to be someone new or at least live in parts of himself that he had left empty for a long time. Meg, it seemed, just wanted to watch TV.

"I don't know how else to say it -- it seems like such a cheap shot but..."

Their second floor duplex had started to fill with them once the girls had moved out and without him really noticing there had suddenly been one in five out of their seven rooms, a highlighted TV scheduled stuck to the fridge and an expanding archive of taped episodes displacing books on the bookshelf by the stairs in the hall. Initially he had thought it was part of the ordered managerial mind that drove her to fill all her time with defined scheduled occupations -- a drive to do something completely and methodically that had play in her favour in the University administration. After the divorce he tried not to think about other possible explanations because they were invariably less generous.

He'd first been to the island on an afternoon when he had been driven out of the house early - unable to hear the sound of the highlighter on cheap TV guide paper anymore. The agent had met him in the gravel parking lot of a boat launch thirty minutes outside of town. Walking a short path through the ceders that separated it from the water, she gave him the basic details, quoting a price that he didn't even attempt to remember and mentioning that the cottage was nothing much to look at, but that the island was private and prime for redevelopment. Was he thinking of building a cottage for his family? He nodded absent mindedly as he got into the small boat - filtering out the sales pitch and imaging that this boat ride across to the unknown cabin was part of his life. A different one.

The place stayed with him for the rest of that year. A summer cottage only, not winterized. It had been hastily cleaned, but the overgrown rock garden and slightly sinking screened-in porch made it clear that no one had really been out here in ages. A path ran from the back door through the trees to another small dock, twisted from not having been brought in before the winter freeze. There was a bench just before it for taking off your shoes and putting down your towel before slipping into the water. On his way out, the agent explaining that the island amounted to an acre and a half of prime land -- more when the lake was low (what a stupid thing to say!) -- he noticed a tall stack of cord wood piled neatly between the trunks of two pine trees growing a few meters from each other. The uneven top row now covered with their needles.

All those traces of life on the island. All the abandoned process there, called out to him. He would dream of stacking wood, or weeding the garden. Or walking down the narrow packed path in his bare feet, feeling the needles dig into the arches of his feet and dropping his towel on the bench before walking off the dock into the clear water. He realized at some point, a few days after he called the agent back -- a year or so later -- that it wasn't necessarily about knowing when to leave, but about seeing that there was somewhere else to go.