The Kayla Series is a year-long, weekly narrative following the imagined first tenant of Oak Hollow Cabins’ Threshold Cabin. Each episode explores what happens when life is intentionally simplified and lived more slowly.
If this is your first visit, you may want to begin with the Introduction or Episode 1.
Kayla hadn’t expected the space to feel so different after the sun went down. The cabin was the same one-room shelter it had been that afternoon, with the same cedar smell rising from the freshly cut boards, the same pale light slipping across the floor. But after dark, everything sharpened. The air cooled. The silence deepened. Even her own breath sounded louder than it should have.
She placed her last box on the built-in table and stepped outside onto the small porch, looking into the thickening blue of evening. The forest around her felt like a single breathing thing, inhaling and exhaling in slow, deep rhythms that didn’t include her yet. Far away, one dog barked again — maybe the same one she’d heard earlier. Then it went quiet. A kind of quiet she hadn’t known in years.
She stood there for a moment, hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket, listening for something familiar. A car somewhere. A TV from a neighbor’s apartment. Even the dull hum of the refrigerator back home. But here there was none of that, not after she switched off the generator. The owners had explained how it worked, how she’d have to run it when she needed power and let it rest otherwise. It wasn’t hard — just different.
The part she hadn’t expected was the silence that followed.
It wasn’t empty. It wasn’t hollow. It was… complete. Like the world had stopped insisting on anything at all.
She went back inside. The lantern she’d bought for this year-long experiment waited on the small shelf near the door — a simple metal one with a warm LED glow meant to imitate a flame. She lifted it, clicked it on, and the cabin filled with a soft, amber light that reached the corners but didn’t erase the shadows. It made the space feel intentional, not improvised.
She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. The mattress was a cheap one she’d ordered online, still puffed from expanding earlier that afternoon. It wasn’t luxury, but it felt solid and clean, like a beginning.
Her phone buzzed on the table — a notification, probably from a group chat she hadn’t had the courage to leave. For a moment she reached toward it, then stopped. The whole point of coming here was to break the reflexes she had leaned on for too long. The constant checking, the scrolling, the way she filled every spare second with noise. She clicked the phone to silent and placed it face down. It felt like a small victory, though she wasn’t sure who she was winning against.
She lay back and stared at the ceiling, the lantern casting low patterns across the boards. Something about the silence made her more aware of herself. Not in a self-conscious way, but in a way that felt strangely honest… and vulnerable. Without sound to cover her thoughts, they came in clearer, cleaner, like water after a storm settles.
Was she running away? She had asked herself that question more than once during the drive here. Maybe she was. But she was also running toward something she couldn’t yet name, something she hoped lived somewhere beyond the noise, beyond the expectations, beyond the internal pressure she’d carried so long she’d forgotten it was pressure at all.
She turned onto her side. Through the window she could see the outline of the Hearth in the moonlight, just a faint shape against the darker tree line. She imagined making that walk early in the morning — lantern in hand, breath rising in small clouds, the world not awake yet. A ritual built not from convenience, but presence.
Her stomach tightened with a mix of nerves and anticipation. She liked that the Hearth wasn’t attached to the cabin. That it required movement, required intention. Back in town everything had been too easy, too close. Ten steps from bed to bathroom. Two taps from distraction to distraction. A life engineered to avoid friction, and somehow that had only made her more tired.
A moth bumped against the window screen, wings brushing with a tiny whisper. She sat up and opened her journal, the one she’d packed last because she still wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to use it. She wrote a single line at the top of the page:
I didn’t realize how loud my life was until it stopped.
She capped the pen and closed the book. The lantern glowed softly beside her. Outside, the wind moved through the tall grasses like a quiet river. She pulled the blanket tighter and lay back down, letting the stillness settle into her chest.
Eventually she clicked off the lantern.
The darkness was immediate. Total. Not the softedges darkness she knew from years of living near streetlights, but an older kind, the kind that existed long before electricity softened the world. She could not see her hand when she held it up. She could only feel her own breath — slow, warm, steady.
For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t even uncomfortable. She felt held by it, like it expected nothing and demanded nothing. The quiet wasn’t empty anymore. It was full — of what, she wasn’t sure, but it felt like something true.
She closed her eyes.
Morning would come, and with it the first walk to the Hearth, the first real cold on her skin, the first instance of choosing intention over habit. But for now, in the absolute stillness, she allowed herself to rest.
The silence wasn’t absence.
It was invitation.
And she was finally ready to listen.
Oak Hollow Cabins 