He came back from the dentist with good news and said so plainly: the implants looked good, the healing was on track, three months until he had teeth again. Someone in the comments had told him it takes six, and he corrected the record without heat — his extractions had happened a year earlier, back in January, so his mouth had already healed before the implants went in. Two months, then a step, then a month more, and the whole ordeal would be behind him. Until then, the calendar held him in place. He would be out of the house before the work was finished, which meant Kentucky parks, something local, something close enough to keep the appointments.
Inside the house, the cats were in the room with him and he was waiting on Amazon. He said it felt like cheating to be in there at all — that he ought to be in the RV all the time — and let the observation sit without arguing with it. The delivery was small: organizational items, dinnerware that wasn't plastic but wasn't glass either, plates and bowls and cups and a few forks and spoons. Four of each, though he had considered two. Maybe he'd have guests sometime. The bigger shipment was coming tomorrow — a gel topper for the bed that a Facebook friend had recommended and that turned out to be made in an RV size, the additional levelers, and tools to begin the insulating. He said he could feel it when the rig wasn't level, front to back or side to side, and he could not wait to finally experience it dialed in. Tonight he would deal with another night in the cold. It had already been a long day.
The sequence was drawn out day by day. He had taken exterior measurements that afternoon and would make a list from them, then go to the hardware store and get everything, then start the insulation Thursday morning — no, Wednesday, with Thursday reserved for the mirrors his dad had recommended. If those mirrors went on and held, he said, he would feel able to drive the thing. Safer. More comfortable. And a travel mug for his coffee, which he didn't own and which was cute and which he wanted.
Then the signal turned. He said the thing that prompted the video wasn't planned and that he wasn't sure he had the right words for it, and he explored it out loud anyway. From the second he got the RV it had been work, work, work. He hadn't taken any time to be happy about it, to be grateful for it, to think about the places he was going to go and see, the new life he was about to begin. He said he thought he was taking some of the enjoyment out of it and hadn't realized he was doing it.
What surfaced it was an email. He had signed up for RV Life and they sent him listings, and looking through the parks in that email he found himself thinking he would love to be there. Not free sites — real campgrounds, but spacious enough. He was trying to get away from trailer on top of trailer on top of trailer. That was the lifestyle he was leaving, not the one he was driving toward.
He asked for recommendations, and said it sounded ridiculous but he hadn't really researched any of it. The last time he had, it was twenty years ago. He'd called state and national parks all over the country and had them mail him material, and he had boxes full of it. He didn't do it then. Somewhere along the journey of his life the boxes went, and he doesn't have that stuff anymore. He named it and moved on.
So the route existed as a sketch: start in Kentucky, maybe the Great Smoky Mountains, then toward Louisiana, then Texas, then the mountains — Arizona — then up to the Northwest, maybe Alaska. A lot of planning, he said, and the timing has to be right too. He was going to spend some time imagining the new life, because he hadn't stopped to do that since he got the rig. He put it on the list alongside the insulation and the mirrors, said he hoped it interested anyone watching, and left it there.