The cat woke him first — Bailey working the desk edge, pushing things off one at a time until the sound did what the sound was designed to do. rswfire came up out of sleep still wearing his teeth. He had worn them all night, which he was not supposed to do, and he said so plainly on camera: the dentist had suggested it because he had struggled to wear them at all in the year he'd had them. They were digging into his gums in one specific place and it hurt. But there had been no gag reflex. All night, none. He turned that over out loud, looking for the variable, and landed on the only thing that had changed — he had stopped smoking. Vaping now. Maybe that was it. He noted that his voice sounded different to himself and let the awkwardness of it stand without apology.
Someone had sent him a denture channel three months back and he had finally watched it — several videos in a row the night before. A man eating an apple, cussing, slamming his fist against the desk. rswfire named his own limit on it directly: too aggressive, he doesn't do well with expressions like that, those are normal emotions but they make him uncomfortable. He kept watching anyway, and what he took from it was not the volume but the mechanics. You press food against the teeth to hold them in place. You learn to eat differently. He hadn't tried eating with them yet. Watching the videos made him realize the road ahead was longer than he had contemplated, and he said that as a fact about the curve, not a complaint about the climb.
The morning organized itself into logistics. Laundry — it had been a while, and there were two laundromats in town he had never actually seen. Groceries — he basically had nothing. A camping supply place somewhere nearby that he'd have to look up again, which might carry things for the RV and might even be able to do work on it; he wanted to ask. The rig needed leveling and he hadn't decided yet whether today was the day. Bailey got louder through all of this, demanding, and rswfire decided the cat was coming with him.
Coffee took two outlets. The small coffee maker plugged in, then the grinder plugged in, beans ground by hand-scale operation in a compact space. He couldn't reach the kitchen sink — things stored on it — so he was drawing water from the bathroom, and he said out loud that he didn't like doing it and didn't trust the water, and then did it anyway because he needed coffee. It came out bad. He called it crap coffee and drank it. He noted he missed his real coffee maker, then walked that back a little — not that much, not really. Hazelnut creamer went on the list. So did coffee itself.
Somewhere in the middle of the sequence he came back around to the teeth. He had to practice talking. The temporary partials wouldn't be there forever — the permanent set was about two months out, and he expected those to be easier. And then, unprompted by anything but himself: he didn't think he should have a lot of shame wrapped up in this. He had never really told the story of how he lost his teeth. He had said Mountain Dew, and it is Mountain Dew, and it's also a much longer story than that. Maybe one day he'd talk about it. He left it there — the story kept, the shame declined, both on his terms.
Bailey wanted out. That was what the salt shaker had been about. rswfire opened the window and observed that this is how you get rid of a cat, and then Bailey was crying again minutes later, and he laughed at the whole arrangement — you just went out there, you've got to be kidding me — and asked what do you want, repeatedly, receiving no answer he could parse. He also noted he'd slept through the night. Not comfortably, the place isn't comfortable to sleep in, and he woke a couple times. But through. He was happy about it. He'd left his dailies in overnight by accident and everything had been blurry on waking; his eyes were irritated now.
The heat was the open question. Today would be nice, but the rest of the week was forecast into the nineties. When it hits the eighties he already puts reflectors on all the windows and the interior still climbs to around seventy-five — tolerable. Ninety was unknown territory. He was genuinely thinking he might need to put reflectors on all the walls. Everything. And there was a slight smell coming from the HVAC unit, some function of it and all that humidity, and he didn't know how to clean up inside a thing like that; ChatGPT had said to get a spray, which was the last item on the list he held up to the camera.
He finished by looking at himself. A moment to admire, he said, and then he adjusted the assessment upward mid-sentence — they actually do look kind of nice, or not even just kind of, they look nice. He would get used to this. Then the day: laundromats to find, groceries to buy, a camping place to locate, a rig to maybe level, a cat riding along.