The camper sat in Brandon's driveway with twenty-eight degrees pressed against its walls, and inside it rswfire was awake at eight in the morning with coffee he had not made himself. He had walked to the house for it — the small tether that still ran between the vehicle and the structure it was parked beside — and he noted the gap out loud: he would truly be living in this place when he could make coffee in here. Before that, he had taken notes. The recording began not with grievance but with a stated frame, delivered before anything else: nothing he was about to say was meant to land as complaint. He was going to be honest about what worked and what didn't, and he conceded up front that not much had worked. That was, he said, the entire point of doing this in a driveway first. All three of them were alive. He counted that as a win.
The drive had come first, the day before. He had brought the rig home and then backed it into the driveway with Brandon on the other end of a walkie-talkie, the two of them working the angles until it sat where it needed to sit. He remembered the fear that had gathered before he started driving it and the way it dissolved once the wheels were turning — there was no point to it, it was not that bad, and he said so plainly. Every time he drove the thing, he knew, it would get easier.
Night one began warm in the only way that mattered. Both cats came to him in the bed, Oliver cuddled up along one arm with a paw in the air, Bailey stretched across the other. It was not a comfortable geometry for sleeping and he knew it, and he gave it to them anyway, because they needed to feel safe and he was in a position to make them feel it. An hour later, still not asleep, he began to hear water. He ignored it at first — later he named that as his first mistake, and turned it into an instruction: don't ignore water sounds. He listened at the window to see whether it was rain. It wasn't. He got up, turned on the lights, followed the gurgling to the kitchen sink, then found the bathroom faucet running full blast. Oliver had done it; he had no theory of how. He shut it off and stood there with no idea how much of it had gone into the tank.
Then the heater took over the night. It kicked on and cycled and kicked on again, loud enough to wake him nearly every time, and he registered it as something a person adjusts to rather than something that ruins a life. The mattress was the harder problem. It came in two parts, cut at an angle so the wall-side section could ride up over the other when the slide came in, and sleeping on it was terrible. He set that against his own history without softening either side: he had been homeless many times, had slept on cement in a mall parking lot, on gravel, in parks, on benches, and had woken up better than he woke up in that bed. When you're young you can sleep anywhere. When you get older the body does not work the same way. He was sore all over. He knew of a company that made custom mattresses, and he knew their prices seemed low enough to worry him about the quality, and he filed it as research.
Under the covers the cold had stayed off him. Getting out of the bed was the moment it arrived — the heater running and the camper cold anyway, and twenty-eight degrees on the other side of the walls explaining it. The propane tank read forty-four percent. The day before it had read seventy-seven. That arithmetic told him the heater was probably not drawing off electric at all, and he named the burn rate as too fast, and named the refill as a thing that made him nervous, and then said he would do it anyway, because he would do whatever he had to do to live this life.
Around him the morning made its noises. Camper sounds, dogs out in the yard, a rooster somewhere behind the house, road noise arriving in intervals. Oliver climbed onto him mid-recording, in a mood, scratching and biting, wanting warmth in a cold room, and rswfire kept talking through it — I am not a scratching post — narrating and negotiating and hosting the animal on his chest without stopping the log. The cab area came last in his notes and it was the worst of it: no privacy, and cold pouring in through the whole front of the vehicle. He had hung a blanket over it, not well, and called it what it was — a placeholder, not a solution, a place that needed real insulation and would get it.
He had watched a video a week earlier, a man showing custom insulation modifications he had built himself out of materials from a hardware store, things that didn't appear in the other videos, and rswfire could tell from watching that they worked. He would rewatch it. That would be a project to tackle before the road. Everything from the night had gone into the same queue: the propane draw, the faucet, the heater noise, the mattress geometry, the cab. He said he did not regret it, that he loved it, that there were no challenges that would make him not love this — that the only remaining question was how to take these things and make them better. He would think about it today and in the days after, and then he would come up with the game plan and start tackling it. Then he wished the people watching a good Monday, and told them that if they were heading to work they could imagine a new life in an RV, because he was doing it, and if he could do it, anybody could.