I have never been so relieved to see a set of patio doors in my life. After six hours of driving from Esbjerg, a wrong turn that took us through what I am fairly certain was someone's farmyard, and a spirited argument with a sat nav that insisted Marielyst was "in the sea, turn around," we finally pulled up to our little holiday cottage. I was so eager to get out that I attempted to open the car door while still wearing my seatbelt, which snapped back with enough force to make me question several life choices.

The cottage itself sat tucked behind a modest hedge, all white weatherboarding and red window frames, looking like something from a children's programme about sensible Scandinavian life. My partner, who had been maintaining a diplomatic silence since the farmyard incident, actually smiled. We stood there on the gravel drive, stretching our legs and breathing in air that smelled of pine and salt and absolutely nothing else, and I felt something in my shoulders drop that had apparently been clenched since approximately 2019.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a minor miracle given our recent relationship with technology. Inside, the place had that particular smell of old wood and fresh linen that makes you want to exhale properly for the first time in months. The living room opened onto a small garden through those blessed patio doors, and beyond the fence I could see nothing but reeds and the suggestion of water somewhere in the distance. No traffic noise. No neighbours visible. Just a wooden table with slightly mismatched chairs, a patch of grass that needed cutting in the most charming way possible, and a single determined butterfly doing laps around a potted geranium.

I had brought three books, which now seems like comical optimism. Within an hour of arrival, I had already abandoned my plans for "exploring the area" and "maybe a bike ride tomorrow" in favour of locating the kettle and establishing which chair in the garden offered optimal sun-to-shade ratio. This turned out to be a more involved process than anticipated, involving me moving my cup of tea three times and eventually just dragging the entire chair to follow the afternoon light like some sort of solar-powered sloth.

My partner disappeared into the bedroom to unpack, reappeared twenty minutes later having accomplished nothing beyond lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, and announced that this was "actually the whole point, wasn't it?" I could not argue. We had come to Falster with a mental list of things we ought to do, places we ought to see, experiences we ought to accumulate, and within half a day the list had crumpled in the face of a comfortable garden and the distant sound of what I choose to believe was a very relaxed dog.

That first evening, we walked barely two hundred metres to where the reeds gave way to proper beach, watched the water do its endless grey-green thing, and walked back. Dinner was bread and cheese from the little supermarket in Bøtø By, eaten at that mismatched table while the butterfly continued its circuit and I read approximately four pages of my novel before dozing off with it open on my chest. I have no photographs of this. I have no interesting anecdotes. I have only the memory of realising, quite suddenly, that I had been confusing doing things with living, and that perhaps the latter required significantly less effort than I had been applying.

The sat nav never apologised, incidentally. I have made my peace with this.