Isolation

She needed isolation. Her job as a waitress at Bottle & Cork, the “World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Bar,” was getting overwhelmingly loud and crowded for her. So as soon as her shift ended, she ran past the rows of beach houses and restaurants and headed for her favorite place in the entire state of Delaware.
To get there, she first had to cross a gravelly parking lot, then a trapezoidal wooden bridge. The bridge was old and graying. It creaked slightly with her steps. Across it was her destination: the gazebo.
The gazebo was shaped like an octagon, stretched at the sides. On top of it was a weathervane that pointed north and south, with a wrought-iron duck atop it. It turned ponderously as the wind blew, creaking with age. She was convinced that, eventually, that duck would fall into the woodchips below. But it hadn’t for all these years, so why would it now?
She just stood on the woodchips for a while, staring into the endless, boundless sea. At the end of one of the two docks in the area sat two boys, crabbing with a chicken gizzard and a green mesh net. Sometimes the crabs would take the bait, only to find themselves scooped up into the net and thrown back into the sea after a brief struggle. Other times they would hook themselves onto the bait with their claws, only to slip off and fall back into the ocean from where they came. She had always found crabs to be odd animals. A speedboat sailed by, with a jet-skier attached to the back. The skier, apparently feeling particularly daring that day, lifted one of his feet. He ended up losing his balance and falling into the water. The driver of the boat laughed, carried him a few feet, and stopped to let him regain his balance.
She shook her head, smiling, and turned to the gazebo itself. It was a bit longer than most ordinary gazebos – the benches on the side facing her and the one parallel to that were especially long, so sometimes she would bring a pillow and lie on them, sleeping for a while. As far as she knew, she was the only one who used this gazebo on a regular basis, so it didn’t feel impolite to her.
She took a look in the mesh window, to make sure nobody was already occupying the gazebo. Sure enough, it was completely empty. So she opened the door, which squeaked the tiniest bit, walked in, closed it, and sat down on one of the two shorter benches. She had a system worked out – the shorter benches were simply to sit on, and the longer ones were to lie on.
For some reason, she found the floor of the gazebo almost hypnotic. It was shaped octagonal, and it rippled outwards, expanding with every floorboard. This was the way most gazebo floors were designed, but this one in particular fascinated her, probably because of the building’s odd shape compared to others of its kind. There was some sand on the floor, sand she had probably tracked in herself. It was entirely likely – this was quite an easy thing to do on the beach. She took off her shoes and ran her feet through this small blanket of sand. It eased her. Anyone who looked into the window would have probably stared, but one of the many reasons she picked this particular isolated spot as her hideout was because nobody stared. Few even knew it existed, which she saw as both a good and bad thing.
She looked out the mesh windows. Outside was a tall osprey’s nest. The rare bird of prey was returning to its home to feed its young, an unfortunate rodent caught between its talons. The tiny but starving birds gave barely audible coos of delight at the arrival of their meal. The family divided the rodent amongst themselves and began to eat. Then the parents took the babies away, in an attempt to teach them how to fly. The young birds struggled, but seemed to be getting steadily closer to flight to the woman, who had watched them every day for months and was mentally chronicling their progress.
After she had watched their flight lessons for a while, she cast her eyes to the ceiling. The ceiling was another unique facet of her little hideaway. It was subdivided into two sections. The first overarched the entire room. But there was an odd indentation in the middle of it. It looked as though it could fit over the central octagon of the floor perfectly, and bore resemblance to an overturned ship. Perhaps it had been inspired by one. Perhaps not.
Her attention changed once more, this time to the windows. The windows were odd as well, in that some had layers of insect netting on them and some did not. Maybe it was because the builders had liked the way it looked, or maybe it was to better let air in during the summer. But she liked to think it was simply because the builders got distracted in the midst of making the windows, had never returned to finish laying the mesh, and simply called it “good enough” later on. She remembered how, when she was young, she had crawled through the meshless windows to get into the gazebo. She had lived in Delaware most of her life, and had known of this gazebo since she was old enough to walk.
After she had stayed there for an hour, simply soaking in the atmosphere of isolation, she stood up and left the gazebo. It was time for her to reluctantly return to the chaos of the outside world, a world of beach bars, tourist traps, and general insanity. It was always hard for her to leave this place and return to her home, but she knew she had to. But each day, at the same time, she always came back.