The Lives I Never Lived

Margot hadn’t planned on staying in the cottage long. It was meant to be a place to catch her breath — a temporary stop on the slow unraveling of what had been her life. But days turned into weeks, and then into something heavier, more rooted. The trees outside had begun to memorize her footsteps. The birds seemed to wait for her morning coffee.

The cottage was old, smelling of cedar and forgotten summers, and the lake behind it had no name on any map she could find. It shimmered like a secret, tucked between the pines and the hush.

Each morning, the fog curled over the surface like breath over glass, and each evening, the water caught the last light of the sun and held it gently, like hands cupped around a candle. She did not come here to be found. She came because she had nothing left to lose, and maybe — just maybe — something left to remember.

Her husband had been gone for nine months, though some days it felt like hours and others like centuries. He died on a Tuesday, with the TV on in the background and Margot reading a recipe she never got to finish. One minute, he was asking where they kept the pepper grinder, and the next, she was standing in the kitchen with her hand on the counter, listening to a silence so absolute it swallowed her name. They’d had a good marriage, people said. Stable. Solid. Long. As if longevity was love’s greatest achievement.

But in the late hours, when the walls softened and memory seeped through the floorboards, Margot let herself admit what she never could before: she had slowly disappeared inside that life. A piece at a time. Not through cruelty, not even through neglect, but through the slow sacrifice women are taught to call devotion. She had once wanted to be a writer. Or maybe a sculptor. Something with her hands, her voice, something that left a mark. But then came the babies, and the job that paid better, and the dinner parties, and the house with the backyard and the “good school district.” Her art became a small drawer in the hallway desk, full of unused sketchbooks and broken pencils.

Now, with the house quiet and the calendar empty, she found herself walking in slow circles, asking questions with no edges: “Did I live the right life?”, “Would I even recognize the girl I used to be?”, “Was there ever really a choice?”

She had become a ghost that cooked three meals a day, paid bills, and watered the potted herbs. The person in the mirror had her face, but the eyes looked through her, not at her. It wasn’t regret, exactly. It was something softer. A kind of mourning for all the lives she never got to live.

So she moved, quietly, to the lake. The kind of place people retire to, or run away to, or return to when the world becomes too loud. There was a town nearby — small and sleepy, with one café and two churches — but Margot rarely left the cottage. Her groceries were delivered. Her phone remained mostly silent.

She began walking the same path each evening — a narrow trail through birch trees that led to the far side of the lake. The air was cooler there, and the light arrived softer, as if the sun respected the silence. It was here, one twilight in early October, that Margot first noticed the change. She had paused by the water, as she often did, watching the ripples breathe across the surface. The sky was a soft bruise, and a single crow skated overhead, its wings slicing through the fading blue.

Then she saw it.

At first, she thought it was her reflection. A trick of the light. But no — the woman in the water was younger. Her posture straighter, her hair longer, loose and wavy. She wore a crisp white blouse and a look of quiet confidence, and behind her stood a wall of bookshelves and a microphone — as if she had just stepped away from recording a podcast or giving a lecture. This woman was speaking, though Margot couldn’t hear the words. She smiled, gestured, paused for laughter.

Margot blinked. The lake stilled. Only her own face looked back.

The next evening, she returned to the lake earlier than usual, her pulse tucked into her throat like a secret. The sky was still bright, the air heavy with the last warmth of the day, but her eyes searched the water as if it could read her thoughts.

At first — nothing. Then, the surface stirred. Not from wind. Not from rain. From something else. This time, the woman in the lake wore hiking boots and a fleece jacket, a backpack slung over one shoulder. She stood at the edge of a mountain ledge, arms raised in triumph, wind tangling her hair as she laughed at something off-screen — maybe a friend, maybe the moment itself. The light on her face was so wild and unfiltered, Margot could almost feel the altitude in her lungs. Every day after that, the lake gave her someone new. A dancer, feet barely brushing the stage before she turned into light. A chef, flour-dusted and laughing in a kitchen alive with music and voices. A woman at a Paris café, sketching strangers into a notebook with ink-stained fingertips.

They were all her — versions of her that had made one different choice. Or maybe two. Versions that had stayed curious, hungry, reckless. Versions that hadn’t tucked themselves into corners or folded their dreams into smaller boxes to fit someone else’s idea of home.

Margot found herself waiting for nightfall. Her evenings became pilgrimages, her footsteps guided by wonder. She never told anyone. Who would she tell? The lake said nothing. It only showed.

At first, Margot tried to follow its suggestions. She signed up for a watercolor class at the community center. Took a solo trip to a nearby hiking trail. Baked a complicated pastry that required both patience and a candy thermometer. But nothing quite clicked. The painting felt hollow. The hike — exhausting. The pastry? It collapsed in on itself, a sticky metaphor in a pan. Margot sat in her kitchen, staring at the deflated shell of ambition, and whispered, “What do you want me to be?” The lake didn’t answer.

But that night, the water showed her something strange. No vision. No reflection. Just water. Still and unremarkable. The sky above it starless, flat. She waited for the woman to appear — the adventurer, the artist, the mystic. But the surface remained blank.

At first, she felt disappointment. Had the magic faded? Had she failed some silent test? But then, like a leaf drifting slowly down through water, a new thought settled into her mind: What if the lake has shown me all it can? What if it’s waiting for me to imagine something else? Something it doesn’t know?

The next morning, Margot pulled the old wicker trunk from the attic. Inside were Christmas ornaments, dusty photo albums, and—buried beneath a forgotten quilt—her childhood marionettes. She held one in her hands — a wooden fox with chipped paint and tangled strings — and laughed. God, I’d forgotten you.

When she was a girl, she had made tiny worlds from cardboard and string, performing puppet shows in the backyard for no one in particular. She gave them names, voices, feelings. She’d even dreamed, for a while, of making stories that children could live inside. She had never seen that life in the lake. And yet, her hands itched to begin. She didn’t ask permission. She spent the next few weeks carving, painting, sewing. She watched tutorials on her tablet and whispered lines to herself as she cooked dinner. She used scraps of old dresses for costumes, turned a broomstick into a stage curtain rod, repurposed a shipping crate into a traveling puppet theater.

Her fingers ached. Her back complained. But her heart? Her heart leaned forward. By November, Margot had created six puppets and a full original story. With trembling hands and a thermos of chamomile tea, she walked into the town’s library and asked if she could host a children’s story hour — just once, just to see. The librarian, a kind woman with round glasses and ink on her sleeves, smiled. “We’ve been waiting for someone like you.”

The night after her first show — a small crowd, a few giggles, one child clapping too hard — Margot returned to the lake. The moon hung low, painting the water in silver. She stood at the edge, waiting. The reflection that looked back at her was her own. Wrinkles, smile lines, silver-streaked hair. No illusions. No fantasies. And yet, her eyes were bright. Rooted. Awake.

The lake offered her nothing new that night. Because she had found something the water could not give: A life not remembered, but invented. One with no prophecy, no echo. Only presence.

The days grew shorter. The trees shed their leaves like quiet secrets, and Margot began to stitch her routines with new threads. Wednesdays became puppet-painting days. Saturdays, she set up a small table outside the café with flyers for her next show. Children waved when they saw her. Some adults, too. The librarian brought her chamomile and said things like, “You’ve lit something up in this town.” Margot only smiled. The truth was quieter than that. She had lit something up in herself.

The lake still shimmered behind the cottage, unchanged and unchanging. She still walked there most evenings, though she no longer waited for visions. Not exactly. Some nights, the water stayed still. Others, it played tricks with light — offering a flicker, a silhouette, a memory. Once, she thought she saw herself in a red coat, standing at a train station she didn’t recognize, holding a violin case she’d never owned. Another time, she saw only ripples — and for some reason, that felt more mysterious than anything else. But Margot no longer chased the images. She let them come and go, like dreams after waking.

She had started a notebook — not the kind with lists or plans, but one filled with sketches, thoughts, little phrases that sounded like poems. On its first page, she had written: “There is no age limit on becoming.”

One evening, in mid-December, Margot lingered by the lake longer than usual. A faint snow had begun to fall — the kind that barely touches the ground before vanishing. She pulled her scarf tighter and stared into the dark glass of the water.

This time, there was no reflection. Not of a dancer, or a traveler, or even herself. Just the dark surface, waiting. And then she saw it. Not a person. Not a vision. But a tiny golden light, like a firefly trapped beneath the water. It flickered once. Twice. And then it moved — deeper, farther, until it faded into the unseen. Margot didn’t try to follow it. She only watched it disappear, her breath curling in the air like smoke. A smile ghosted across her lips.

Not everything needed to be understood. Some things were meant to be followed slowly, step by step, without knowing what they would become.

That night, she returned home and opened her notebook. On the next blank page, she drew a circle. Then she drew another one just outside it. And another. She stared at the pattern for a moment — a kind of spiral, a quiet echo of something growing outward, not inward.

Then she wrote: "Maybe I am not finding myself after all. Maybe I am making myself from scratch."