Six in the morning on a Monday, and rswfire was already outside, walking. The rain was coming down on the campground loop and he was moving through it with a camera running, narrating as he went. His first observation was about himself: the circadian rhythm was returning. Not through anything engineered — he named what he had tried before, the array of special lights in the house, the very bright ones for daytime and the other set in the evening that mimicked dusk, and the ramelteon he had taken alongside them. He stated that it worked great. He also stated that he wanted the natural way. And here he was at six in the morning, awake, outdoors, without any of it.
The field around him was loud with life. Birds jittering away, saying good morning, as he put it. The rain and the birdsong filled long stretches where he said nothing at all, walking, letting the recording hold the sound of the place. The world is so alive — that was the reading he took of the morning, and then he let it stand without elaboration.
Partway through the walk something else surfaced, and he tried to describe it while knowing he could not finish the description. He kept wanting to look in on his own life. He said he could not really explain it yet, because he did not understand it himself. It was a wanting to take a peek, to observe from a distance — this is my life here, I live in there — and the impulse remained unexplained even as he named it. He offered one partial account: that it made the life easier to share, because he was just as interested in it as anyone watching. Then he marked the curiosity itself as the object of interest and kept walking.
The loop carried him past his former site, the ground he had occupied a week earlier. He remembered arriving there. He remembered going through withdrawal on that spot, and he said it plainly — that it was hard, that it is hard — the tense shifting mid-sentence, the past and the present of it sitting in the same breath. He did not stop there. He noticed a bench.
The bench held his attention for a moment in the way infrastructure does when you live inside it. It was wet out, everything was wet, and his own bench had a cover on it that he had put there. This one had no cover and still looked like something you could sit on. He worked out why: the wood absorbed water well. A small observation, made carefully, on a rainy morning, about a bench.
Then the hills. He said he had never really noticed them until now — corrected himself, said truly he had not — and looked at them. He set that against his first week at this place, when he had not liked it here. The hills were pretty. He was still getting better, and he said he could feel it: I can feel myself healing. The healing was named as ongoing, not completed.
He left the arc open on purpose. He said he was excited to see where he ends up — a week from now, a month from now, how he would feel, what his life would look like — and did not answer any of it. He said he really does love rain, that this could not be a more perfect morning, and turned outward one last time to wish whoever was listening a good Monday. Then he thanked them for listening, and the walk continued into the wet loop and the birds.