He had not planned to post anything. That was the first thing he said, sitting indoors with the camera close and the light domestic and unremarkable, the cat already in frame and already against him. It had been a complicated day, and the reluctance was real — he named it directly, the concern about coming across too negatively, the sense that some days do not want to be broadcast. But the cat was there. Six years of him, big now, warm, unmistakably pleased to be in the room. That was the thing rswfire wanted to show, and it turned out to be enough reason to turn the camera on.
The retrieval had happened earlier, at his parents' place, the third visit of its kind. He had gone back for the cat and brought him home, and afterward — after leaving there — the sadness arrived. He traced it aloud without hurrying: guilt for having left the animal so long, and guilt for having entertained the thought of never picking him up at all. He did not soften either admission. He also did not let it stand alone. The placement had been an act of love, he said, made from a very bad place, made so the cat could be cared for properly. He held both facts in the same hand — that he had known better, and that it had been love — and let neither cancel the other.
Then came the sentence that functioned as the day's actual architecture. He had noticed, at some point, that life was easier without the cat. He said it plainly, and then refused it: that is not a good reason to abandon the things that are this special. The standard was stated once, without elaboration, in the middle of a handheld video on a Sunday afternoon, with the subject of the standard purring somewhere near his chest.
Oliver was not there. Oliver had hidden — all three times, every visit. rswfire said he was very sad about it and that he was trying to understand it, that there could be a lot of reasons, that he did not know what to make of a cat who had attached himself to his parents and now would not come out. He carried some guilt over that too. And here he addressed the audience directly, ahead of the comments he expected: not to tell him guilt is useless. He did not agree. Emotions serve a purpose. He had always been comfortable with his feelings, he said, and he was comfortable with these.
The day had been spent, in large part, elsewhere — at a keyboard, in an hours-long conversation with ChatGPT that went, in his words, really in depth into everything he was dealing with as far as this life transition. They had covered the YouTube channel and all kinds of stuff. He proposed publishing the whole thing, long as it was, because there was value in watching how he used it to better understand himself. It was the same instinct as the camera: the day was hard, so document it, so make it available.
What surfaced in that conversation he named at the end. Today he started to grieve his old life. He never sees his mother anymore, and it did not seem like that was going to change. The household his parents keep now held Oliver's attachment instead of his. And it was Mother's Day — he said it almost as an afterthought, another thing, of course.
There was one more plan. A video about the cat, made properly on the desktop, in the desktop version of the editing software, with music, using footage from before YouTube — back when the animal was a day old and abandoned by his mother and very little. His whole story, which rswfire said is kind of his story too. He allowed that it would probably take a while, and hoped aloud that it would be more than just a thought, that he would follow through. Then he stopped planning and went back to what he had been doing all afternoon: sitting with him. The attachment was obvious, and it was the obviousness that got to him. It gutted him, he said. He hoped everyone had a good Sunday. It had been quite a day.