He woke that first morning with a question already forming — whether he would regret it. The thought arrived before he was fully upright, sharp and unembellished: what did I just do. Then he opened the door and stepped outside into rain and gray light, and the question answered itself. There was a road nearby, close enough that vehicles passed at intervals. There was a neighbor. There was the wet quiet of an overcast morning in a place he had chosen. He looked at it and said out loud that it was awesome.
Behind him, the camper held everything he had moved and nothing he had assembled. The shower was full of things because there was nowhere else to put them. The galley surfaces were loaded. His shaving kit was somewhere in the system but not locatable, so he could not shave. He could not shower. He wanted to make food and knew he was not ready to. And there were ants — an infestation, he called it, delivered flat, one item on a list of the morning's actual conditions rather than a grievance. He named each of these the way a person names inventory.
The doctor's appointment was scheduled for that morning, virtual. His plan was simple: show them where he was and work out what happens now that he is on the road. He knew already what the answer would be — the clonazepam and the tramadol would not follow him here. He said he was not excited about that. He also said he had known it would happen, that when he picked this lifestyle it was a choice he was making, and he placed the discontinuation on the ledger of terms he had accepted in advance rather than on the ledger of things happening to him.
His voice was rough, and he attributed it to the drive. Oliver had been fine — chill, this time. Bailey had not been, and the two of them had talked and yelled at each other the whole way, the carrier tried and abandoned as too stressful for both. rswfire considered medication for Bailey the next time they moved. But they were fine now, and Oliver was doing so great: rswfire had put rugs down inside, and the rugs changed everything. The cat read the floor as home. rswfire noted the shift and said it was really cool to see.
Then the day's work, spoken as a list of things he intended to test. The solar had not yet been brought out, and it had fallen over that first day, so he wanted to set it up and confirm nothing was damaged. He wanted to try the new extension cords and make sure they worked. He wanted to bring out the satellite dish. Starlink had not satisfied him, so he had ordered a replacement service, routed to his parents' house on Wednesday — tomorrow, he thought — though it would likely be later in the week before it reached him. What he wanted from it was always on: connectivity running in the camper whether or not he was there, so the Wi-Fi temperature monitoring stayed live for the cats, so the cameras kept running, so everything kept working and he could see it from wherever he was.
The bugs came up again. And then aging — he said he used to love this lifestyle, that he still does, and that he thinks he is just getting older, that you change when you get older. He let the observation stand without repair.
He had had two neighbors so far. The current one was an older man with a dog, gone off with his boat to fish. rswfire did not know the man's story and said so, marking the limit of what he was reporting. What he had was the observation: the man could not walk fully upright, was not particularly old, carried himself hunched a little — and had embraced this lifestyle anyway, with his dog. Before him was another older man with a small dog, present only the first night, mostly seen leaving. From that first moment, rswfire registered the pattern — a lot of single people doing this, or people on their own at least — and said he was trying to draw courage from it.
He wrapped up the recording without knowing when he would return to it, mentioning editing and making things nicer as a someday. He had wanted to say hi, to report how they were doing, and his assessment was that they were doing pretty good. Then one more note before he stopped: he had published an image-text post on YouTube the day before about what he was doing to get organized in there. He had a bunch of ideas. He needed more. He was hoping for input.