The recording opened with rswfire already mid-negotiation with himself over how to say the thing he had decided needed saying. He named the risk in the first breath — that it would sound ungrateful, that it would sound like complaining — set both aside as inaccurate, and went ahead anyway. What he had to report was a number. Forty people had watched the hiking video, the first one he had cut on his desktop with music, the first one he had actually edited rather than simply posted. Two-thirds of those forty were his own subscribers. It had zero likes. Against that number he set another: five months, over three hundred videos, at least two a day, his life going out into the channel continuously. He said the arithmetic had upset him. He said it made him wonder who he was sharing his life with, and whether the answer was people who cared.
He placed Luna into the timeline precisely. He had decided he was quitting YouTube — the third time, he thought — and that same day he went hiking, and when he came back there was Luna. Six weeks old, tiny, bony, dealing with challenges of her own, and nobody else was helping her. He described the reasoning that followed as a kind of concession: he supposed he had to share her story, because maybe that would bring in support for her. He was clear about the direction of the ask. The money was not for him. He named his own financial situation as a standing struggle, five months of doing his best to make the lifestyle work, close but not there, and then said plainly that the audience owed him nothing. The word he kept circling was not money. It was value. He said he had thought he was building something and had learned he wasn't, that he was struggling to understand what he had actually built, and whether it served a purpose. He did not answer the question. He said he did not have the answer, said he would leave it there for now, and said good night.
The second recording began with a mess. She had pooped on the bed the moment he got her up there, and he said so without ceremony — that this was not the right environment for this, that he was losing all his towels and his blankets, that she still had to be taught the litter box. Bailey was in the space and freaked out. Then rswfire named the thing he was about to walk directly into: his position that the smallest things in life are the deadliest — bacteria, viruses, fleas, parasites — and that having Luna here was therefore a challenge, because those were exactly the things that freaked him out. Having said it, he took her out of the cage. She was six weeks old and could not be kept in there. He picked up the flea comb and sat down with her.
What followed was a technique built in real time by someone who said, repeatedly and without embarrassment, that he had no idea how it was done. He had no experience with a kitten this small. He talked to her continuously through the not-knowing — asking how it felt, asking if it hurt, apologizing before wetting her down, telling her she had already been through enough. He looked for where they congregated and found them at her neck. He worked with water first, then wipes so he wouldn't have to drown her, then a soft bristle brush because he had read that was what you use on a kitten. He said out loud that he might be supposed to be doing it backwards, tried it the other way, and kept going. He described what he was pulling off her as the grossest thing he had ever done in his life and did not stop doing it. He tried to turn her upside down and asked her permission first. He said it was a necessary evil. He said, more than once, that he was not hurting her.
He kept scoring his own thoroughness against a standard he never lowered. Halfway, he noted. Only halfway. He found less than he expected in the places he expected, said so, called it strange, went back. He reached the sensitive areas and narrated why the chemical treatment Bailey gets was not an option for her — too young — which was why this had to be done by hand, by him, tonight. When he arrived at maybe, he stated it as maybe: maybe we got this under control. When she got sketchy about the hind legs, he called her reaction totally expected and did not push it as a failure.
Underneath the procedure ran a second track, the one that never stopped. So tiny. So bony. I don't know what to do about it. Small enough that he observed there was only so much surface area for them to live on. Between the passes he said the same thing over and over in the register of a promise being kept in the present tense — I got you, I got you, I got you — and then he showed her the bed he had gotten for her, too big for her now, and told her she would grow into it. The question he had left open an hour earlier, about whether what he built serves a purpose, he did not return to and did not answer. He gave the night to the comb and the water and the wipes instead, and they tried out the bed.