The camper was hot when rswfire got back in it. He had napped — not something he does, he states, but lately he has not been sleeping enough, and he names the lack of it as the thing that had been working on his mood. The cats stayed behind at the camper. He had a thirty-minute drive to a store, groceries to get, chili to make, and a standing problem he had not solved: the tanks needed emptying, and there was no clean way to move the animals for a task that only took him to the front of the park. He said aloud that you cannot just give them Benadryl and have them sleepy all day for that. He turned the AC on and started driving with the phone recording sideways, apologizing for it, telling whoever would watch that they would manage.
The park roads were narrow. He remembered driving them in, and said the narrowness was the hard part, a little scary, and that he would get used to it because he wanted to. Turn-by-turn audio kept talking over him — half a mile, stay on Slick Park Lane, take the next right — while the lake moved in and out of view behind trees, bigger than what he had been able to see from where he was parked. He passed campers scattered through the back roads and said he bet the people living there loved it. He passed seventy acres for sale and said he liked the land. Somewhere earlier there had been a man out fishing, and rswfire had thought about buying fishing gear at the store, then talked himself out of it on the grounds that he would not know what to do with a fish if he caught one. He said he wanted to get on that water. He wondered whether you could swim in it. He said he really wanted to get in a boat.
The gate stopped him at the front of the park. He did not know whether he had to enter a code to get out, said so on camera, said no way, that can't possibly work that way — and then it lifted on its own. He worked out the logic in real time: the code is for coming in, not for leaving. "I'm learning, guys," he said. "Whole new world for me." Then the line he says he loves saying because it is true — that he lived on the internet, and now he lives in the real world. He added that it is a beautiful place, then corrected himself: not all beautiful. He said he would put that on a t-shirt one day.
Pulling out of the park and onto the county road, he started from essentially zero in third gear, noticed it, said he was definitely in the wrong gear for that. The navigation kept issuing instructions — Smith Bend Lane, one mile — and the drive settled into distance and heat and unreliable cell service. Somewhere in it he said what the trip was for: that he wanted a different life, and has one now.
He arrived at the Walmart in Carthage without being sure he would. The mapping program had gone haywire, service out there was bad, and he stopped the vehicle and started recording again from the parking area. But the first thing he said in that second capture was not about the drive. His mother had called. She had found his journals — in a box in his cat's room, an Alienware box, probably where he put them when he took them out of that black bag. He said it was the most amazing news he could have gotten. He said he was so happy. The written record of the life he conducted on the internet had been sitting intact in a box the whole time, and it surfaced on the same afternoon he was learning gate codes and lake roads in rural Tennessee.
Then he addressed the people watching, many of whom had not been following him from the beginning. He told them how to read him: that he processes his emotions outward, that when he gets frustrated it comes out, that it can sound like he is unhappy with the life he is trying to live and that is not the case. He said he is working through a lot. He mentioned the new habit of talking to himself — in the car, in the camper — said he does not think it makes him crazy, and that he had asked ChatGPT about it. He described it as the cost of pushing himself far outside his comfort zone in order to embrace something completely new. He reminded them that he had been terrified of everything he did at the start and did it anyway because he knew there was a payoff at the end, and said this would be no different. Then he laid out the rest: groceries for himself and the cats, chili tonight, and tomorrow the drive back to the house — not home, he corrected, the house — for his mother's packages, for the journals, and to finish clearing it out. And then, he said, just keep moving forward. He wished them a good weekend and went inside.