Morning came at seven, or near enough, and by the time rswfire started recording it was almost eight and Oliver had already claimed his lap. The cat had been there since he got up an hour earlier — good this morning, rswfire said, and said it again to Oliver directly, addressing him as the awesome cat he is, narrating the cat's own side of the exchange. Six hours of sleep. It had felt like more when he woke. He named the morning as introspective before he named anything else, setting the register for what followed, and he ruled out anxiety explicitly: not anxious, just excited, and a little impatient. Friday was the wall he was waiting behind. The camper existed, scheduled, four hours south, and not yet his.
The game plan came out in one long unspooling, the way a thing does when it has already been thought through and only needs saying. Walkie-talkies, ordered from Amazon, arriving soon. His father coming with him for the drive down. Four hours south in the Jeep, and then not four hours back, because it would be a camper and he would be driving slower and it would be his first time — call it six, he said, and plan for an all-day event. The insurance ran the wrong direction for the easy version: his father sits on rswfire's policy through the Jeep, not the RV, and rswfire wasn't sure the coverage would reach. But he moved past the constraint before it could become the reason. I want to drive it anyways, he said, because well I just got to be brave right.
Oliver started attacking mid-sentence. Be good, dude. Be good. Don't bite me, it's not nice. The correction folded into the logistics without breaking their thread, and the plan kept going. He would not leave the dealership lot right away. He would stay parked and get used to it — adjust the mirrors, run tape along the windshield to mark the lane lines, the trick he'd learned somewhere in the research, all the things that turn an unfamiliar vehicle into a legible one before it touches a highway. Only after that would he pull out, with his father trailing behind in the Jeep and a radio channel open between them. A second set of eyes. Someone to say when the next lane was clear, when to get fuel — diesel now, which was new — and his father had driven truck, so the help was real help and not just reassurance. He planned to record some of it. He thought it would be a fun trip for them.
The night before, he had spent a long time with ChatGPT working out how to be safe about this, and he wanted people to see the conversation itself, not just the conclusions. He said he'd link it in the comments. He tried to describe the method and admitted he didn't quite know how to explain it — you get an answer, you follow up on separate points inside it, you scroll back up to something it said earlier and bring that forward, and the conversation becomes a thing you build rather than a thing you request. Once you've used it long enough you start to understand how to navigate a conversation with it. He offered the transcript as evidence of the practice, not as an endorsement — check it out, you'll see why I rely on it so much.
Then the mouth. Four implants in, and one of them behaves differently than the others: a tightness up high, on the left, feeling like it reaches into the nostril. It had been that way since the beginning. He knew why — that one had gone in at an angle, angled again to the left, something structurally different from the rest. He tracked it precisely and assessed it without alarm: doesn't hurt at all, just feels weird, might be nothing they can do, maybe over time he just gets used to it. He thought he might call them. What mattered to him in the reading was the absence of rejection — he didn't feel like the implants were being rejected, and he was happy about that, because what he was waiting for on the other side of the healing was to wear teeth again. Bottom ones already, temporary top ones seen. They're beautiful when they're in.
He closed the way he opened, on the introspection and the slow start, and then corrected the calendar out loud: it was Monday, he'd been wrong, yesterday hadn't been Saturday. Time to go look at towing unit stuff. He wished the viewers a good day, a good Monday, and left it there — the camper still four days and four hours away, the radios still in transit, the tape not yet on the glass, and the cat still in his lap.