The cats went first. rswfire drove them to his mom and dad's in two large rectangular carriers — the Kitty City ones — and somewhere in the handoff Oliver got out. A zipper that had never been as secure as it looked. He noticed it there, at the house, with the animals already placed, and turned it over as he drove away: the carrier would have failed eventually, on some road, in some parking lot, at some worse moment. It was probably for the best. He said that phrase more than once on the drive, not as reassurance but as a finding he kept re-testing and kept arriving at.
The drive itself was Kentucky, camera facing him, the day's second leg. Ahead was the house — the last day he was permitted to be there. He was going to soak in the bathtub and say goodbye to the place. He named the withdrawal directly as he drove, calling it an active load, saying it was killing him, and then immediately separating it from the rest: it was amplifying what he was already feeling, not generating it. He kept the two channels distinct. The physiology was one thing. The grief was another, and he named grief as the day's dominant current — the emotion flowing through him, not fun, not liked, and not something he intended to do anything about except let it be.
He mapped the shape of it while the road went by. He had been homeless. He had needed a house, had needed a home of his own, had carried the worry of losing one for as long as he'd had one. He never thought he would give one up. He did. And the new life was so hard that he found himself saying, again, that he was not regretting it — stating plainly that he wasn't saying it to make himself believe it, that something closer to remorse was present alongside the certainty and he wasn't going to collapse the two. He said he would really miss his mom. He said he didn't know what to do. He said he could almost start crying. The cats weren't coming back with him. That was sad. It was also for the best.
He audited the decision from the cats' side rather than his own. Part of him had considered getting one, raising it in the camper, making it work differently — and he ruled it out on the grounds that it would dishonor them. Then he audited himself with the same directness: he had freed himself from the responsibilities he'd been holding because he needed to get his house in order, because he hadn't been handling them well, and because he was not handling the responsibility of himself well at all. He had to figure it out. That was the statement — no softening on either end of it.
He explained why the channel existed. He said he needed the support, and that a person doesn't end up friendless without having made certain choices. He hadn't stayed in touch. He hadn't tried to make friends when he moved to Kentucky, and he'd been there a long time now, and he wasn't sure how an adult goes about it anyway, so he never really tried. He hadn't taken himself outside his comfort zone at all. So part of the whole design was exactly that: leave the house, live in a camper, travel the country, force the exposure, stay open, see what comes. He said it feels very hard. He said he's glad he's doing it. He said he's capable of it, that he'll work through it, that something good is going to come out of it.
The trolls came up the way weather comes up. The comments were getting nasty. He looked at them and wondered what kind of person writes them, whether the cruelty is miserable at its source, why so many people are mean and unhappy — a thing he said he has never understood about this world. He had warned his mom about it from day one and given her the frame he uses himself: if someone says something about his teeth or whatever, remember it's engagement, and engagement helps on YouTube. He held both readings at once — the metric and the sadness of the testament — without picking one.
Then he arrived. The empty house, the bathtub, the last access. He said he was going to go say goodbye to the place, soak for God knows how long — years, maybe — and then drive back to the camper and figure out what he was doing with the rest of his life. The water was the final use of the old system. Everything past it would have to be carried.