The house was nearly empty when rswfire began recording, though not empty enough. His mother was inside. The dumpster on the property had already been filled — past the point of accepting anything more — so whatever remained in the rooms behind him had to be sorted by hand into two categories: what traveled with him, and what stayed. There was less than there had been. There was still more than he wanted. He stood in the middle of that arithmetic and named it plainly, without complaint, the way a person names weather they intend to drive through anyway.
Before the sorting, there was an accounting to give. On the way to the house he had made two videos and then deleted them. Few people had seen them, but some had, and he addressed those people directly. The person who had prompted the videos was not a troll, he said, but belonged in the same category — and he was not going to keep giving attention there. He deleted the comments. He moved on. The decision was already executed by the time he described it; the description was courtesy, not deliberation.
Then he said the thing he wanted said to everyone. You do not have to be an expert at this. If your heart is calling you to do something, just do it, and you will figure it out. He was clear that this extended past the doing and into the company you keep while doing it: the people telling you that you can't, or that you're doing it wrong, are people to cut out. He flagged it as his own philosophy, possibly bad advice, offered with a grain of salt — and then he explained why it was not optional for him. Some people can dismiss that kind of talk. He isn't like that. It gets under his skin. He looks at those voices the way you look at poison, and you cut the poison out. He put the consequence in one line: he'd still be stuck in this house if he hadn't. The same rule that emptied his comment section was the rule emptying the rooms.
Ahead of him was a long drive, and after it a campground, a lake, and a drawer he expected to start going through that night. He was not excited about it. He said so and let it stand. He told the people watching they might not hear from him for a while. What he pictured on the other side of the drive was specific and unhurried — sitting in his seat outside, watching the cats move through their environment, looking out at the lake, reading. Some of what was still in the house was theirs, cat things, and they'd be getting new configurations once he arrived. That, he said, would be cool.
Mid-sentence, sawdust came down on him. He looked up, noticed there was nothing overhead that should have produced it, said it had to be termites or something, and let out a low wow. The house was releasing material even as he stood in it deciding what to carry out. He didn't dwell. He wished everyone a good weekend and left it there.
Then the frame changed, and so did the pitch of him. The journals were out — boxes of them — and he held them up as if the earlier footage had been prologue. Now maybe you understand why I was so upset. He opened one, then another. Front to back. A real old one, very small print, filled edge to edge. Years of it. Decades of it. He said he was so glad to have these back, that he never thought he'd see them again. The house had failed as a container and was being dismantled; the record it had been holding came out intact and returned to his hands, continuous, in his own writing, waiting to be read at a lake.
The last thing he did was point the camera at the street. A genuine Willys was parked out front. How cool is that. Then the recording ended, and the drive began.