The morning came in level. rswfire greeted the camera the way a person greets a room they've decided to stay in — a Friday behind him, peaceful, slept through the night. Then the correction: he woke up in back pain, and the back pain is awful. He had already researched it. The mattress in the camper comes in two parts and is cut through the middle at an angle, and he states there isn't a good commercially available replacement for that specification. What exists are hinged versions, a couple of options, and he's looking into them. The problem had been named, measured, and moved into an open work item before the coffee was made.
The coffee was not yet mastered. He said so plainly — too much stuff everywhere, the setup recent, the sequence not yet worn into habit. He hasn't done it enough times. It's been busy. He noted he isn't using a heater, isn't going to blow anything up. The camper is a space he lives in but has not yet organized into working order, and he narrated that gap without apology, moving through it while the water ran.
Then the disclosure he had been holding for the morning: he can't trust his own thoughts. Tramadol withdrawal, he explains, disrupts the neurotransmitters — they get way messed up, and it takes time for the body to resume doing its own thing. Until then, his thoughts are unreliable. He said he didn't know that. And then, in the same breath, the part that does not resolve: he's still going to have thoughts. He found that interesting. He turned it over on camera, mid-routine, and did not stop moving. What he needed was milk. He got the milk.
The tea came up because it always comes up. He keeps mentioning it. He wants to try it. He bought a kettle — a gettle, he called it, just makes hot water somehow — and thinks he's misplaced the plug. He's never made tea in his life that he can think of. Drank it a couple of times. Never liked it. But he bought the whole apparatus a while ago: honey sticks, a variety pack, everything required to find out whether tea was something he'd like. He never made a single one.
The buying came before the move. Before the camper, he knew he needed a change, and he tried lots of different things — tea among them — and did not follow through on a lot of them. The supplies are still there, unopened, provisioned ahead of the practice they were meant to serve. Definitely want to do that now, he said. That's where his head was that morning: contemplating making new choices, because that was the path he was on before the withdrawal derailed it.
He assigned the misestimation to himself. He could have researched it better. He truly thought, in his head, a few days of physical withdrawal and you'll be fine. He had no idea. That's on me. No one else entered the accounting.
And then the close, which was not a resolution: so yeah, I'll make the best of it. The mattress still cut at an angle, the kettle still missing its plug, the tea still in the box, the thoughts still arriving and still flagged unreliable — and rswfire in the middle of it with the correction applied, drinking his coffee, listing the next available actions.