Nine o'clock on a Sunday morning, and rswfire had already been awake a while. In the old life the television would have been on by now, the news filling the room before he had decided anything about the day. In this one he woke into quiet, and four months in, the quiet still registered. He said so plainly — that some days it still struck him, this difference, that he had not yet worked out what to fill all the hours with. It was not a complaint. It was an observation made from inside the configuration, by someone still learning the shape of it.
Outside, the site had changed. New neighbors had arrived the day before and spread past the boundary of their platform — gear everywhere, more of them than the site was drawn for. rswfire named the friction directly: it was difficult for him to have people that close. And then he named what he saw when he looked over anyway. Generations of one family, all of them there together. He said it was endearing, that it was not something you could hold a negative opinion about, that it was nice to see. Both things stood without needing to be reconciled.
Inside, the work was the camper. Something had shifted in his thinking when he returned to it — he walked in and it felt like home, and with that came a new posture toward the standing problems. Not endure them. Deal with them, and then sit with the result for a while before changing anything else. The closet was already done, completely reorganized, more inside it than he had expected to fit, and he said he was proud of himself for it. It felt organized. It felt like a good space for his things. The rest of the day belonged to the floor: get everything off it, throw a lot of it away, keep downsizing. He had been in this lifestyle long enough now to know what was not useful in it. Clutter did not sit well with him, and a cleared floor meant a slide that moved in and out easily, and a slide that moved easily meant routines, and routines meant the nomadic configuration might start running itself.
Bailey crossed the frame, as Bailey does — no concept of space, right there every time the camera comes on. rswfire told him he loved him to death, and kept going.
There was a compressor somewhere. He could visualize buying it, could see himself putting it in a bag, and then it had gone into the outside storage bay, which is not large, which should have made it obvious, and he had not been able to find it that day. Today he would look again. Tomorrow was the tire shop, maybe. He was honest about not being ready — not putting it off, he said, just not prepared yet, close but not there. The rig did not feel mobile to him. He used the word immobilized. And underneath that sat the sequence he could state exactly: tires, then the bad, then moving to another campground, then finding new work, because he wanted to start making money. Each layer waiting on the one before it.
Then he turned the camera up to the roof, because this one he wanted witnessed. Condensation everywhere — the whole ceiling beaded like the outside of a bowl of ice cream. Enough water that he had gone through several hand towels wiping it down; the microfiber one had not worked as well. The dehumidifier was running. The humidity was high. It was a temperature differential, he knew that, and it was still wild to him. He said it was bad and he had to deal with it, and then followed the problem forward to the part he could not yet solve: he did not know how anyone cleans the air conditioning ducts on the roof. Take it somewhere, maybe. That much water leads to mold, and that is not an easy space to reach. Another thing you do not anticipate. Another thing you are constantly dealing with in an RV.
The night before, something had been crawling on the roof. Gone now. He did not know what it was. What stayed was the low-level alertness he described as always running — that he is in the woods, that a field mouse getting inside is the thing he does not want, that he suspects every RV meets it eventually and hopes his does not.
He was going to get the day started. Get the place as organized as he could. He said he was so close, and that he would be so happy once it was done — that it would feel like a true accomplishment, that it would make his life feel more manageable. Then he wished whoever was watching a good Sunday, and went to clear the floor.