Bailey woke the whole RV at three in the morning. Not for food, not for a door, not for anything rswfire could identify — the cat simply cried in the dark until everyone in the small interior was awake with him. rswfire got up, knowing from experience that sleep would not return quickly, and picked up the camera instead. The light was low. The frame was handheld. Nothing about the capture had been planned.
He opened with the cat, because the cat was the reason he was awake, and then turned to the thing that had been accumulating in his comment stream for some time now. People kept telling him to taper. He decided to answer it directly rather than let it keep arriving one comment at a time. In an ideal world, he said, that is exactly what he would do — off the pills slowly, over months, over whatever period made sense. He knew the shape of that architecture because he had already built it once. With clonazepam, the taper had taken more than a decade and had happened almost without effort, the dose falling away naturally as his life changed around it, until what remained was a quarter of a milligram. Basically nothing. He described the endpoint with a kind of precision — the residue of a protocol executed correctly, over years, by choice.
Then he laid out why that architecture was not available to him now. Four decades with the same doctor. He described the man as awesome, as the one person in the world he trusted with his health, as something close to a friend. When rswfire moved into the RV, he expected the news to be received as good news — the doctor had been pushing him toward something new, had known he was not happy where he was. So he sent word through MyChart, and the message that came back was heartfelt. That was the last part of the relationship that behaved the way four decades had trained him to expect.
He made an appointment. And at the appointment, he states, the doctor put his staff between them. rswfire could no longer talk to him. He returned to the account twice in the telling, as if checking the structure for a load-bearing member he might have missed: a man he had known for decades, and suddenly he could not reach him, with no cause given. He said plainly that he did not understand it, that he did not know what to think about it, that it was the most bizarre thing he could have imagined happening. He did not offer a theory. He named the rupture and left it standing as a rupture.
What he did do was respond. He told the doctor he felt completely failed and that he was shocked, and then he left. And with that channel closed, the taper closed with it. So he does it the hard way. Cold turkey — not as a protocol he selected, but as the only remaining path once the gate came down. He located the cause exactly where he found it: not in his own reasoning, not in the pills, but in a clinic's access architecture and the person behind it. Then he turned the finding outward to the people watching. Be very careful what you tell your doctors. He had trusted this man deeply. He would not have thought in a million years it would go this way.
And then Bailey again, still crying, somewhere in the dark of the RV. rswfire went looking for him — there he is — and the register shifted without breaking, the medical account and the cat occupying the same three a.m. air. He told Bailey it was three in the morning, that this was not appropriate, that he did not need to be sat on. He said he truly had no idea why the cat does this. The brother, apparently, had gotten used to it. The last words in the frame were an instruction to go back to bed, addressed to a cat, delivered by a man who had just placed on public record the closing of a forty-year clinical relationship and the method that closure left him.