It is 4:30 in the morning and rswfire is awake because that is when he wakes now. The light in the RV is poor and he says so directly to the camera — sorry for the lighting, maybe I can get a little better, probably not though — and then stops apologizing for it. He has been parked on this cape for about a week. The cat moves through frame. Outside, past the dark, is the edge he goes to: the void edge, he calls it, the place where he sits and looks at the ocean and feels the call of the void arrive in him, every time, as an experience rather than a threat. He is not filming to announce anything. He is filming to think out loud about whether to film at all.
The night before, there had been a man in his bed, and the two of them had watched rswfire's old videos together. He describes the guy as truly awesome — super nice, absolutely loved this guy — and sorts him with no hesitation into friend rather than lover, the categorization made cleanly and without loss. What holds rswfire's attention in the retelling is not the man but the footage: he watched himself and found it filled with joy, found it genuinely entertaining, found himself amused by so many things. All the different layers of me, he says. The depth of it. There's not enough of that in the world. So maybe. Maybe he shares some of it. Selectively. He does not decide.
He tries to place himself in time and can't quite. Since my heart opened — almost a month, three or four weeks, he isn't sure, time feels a little different these days. In that unmeasured span he has been all over the place. He hiked Humbug Mountain and tore a muscle in his core he did not know existed and absolutely loved it. The next day he hiked Cape Sebastian anyway, making it worse, and found the trail down to a private beach reachable only by holding a rope and propelling himself down it. He got to the bottom. He was the only person there. He looked at the waves. And he was bored to death — what is even the point of this, this is boring — and rather than making that mean anything about himself, he took it back up the hill and handed it to an AI as a design problem: what are other ways someone like me could experience a beach. They arrived at sandcastles, which he immediately converted into lighthouses, because lighthouses are void-penetrating devices, which is the coolest thing ever. He never built one. Maybe one day.
He took the Jeep everywhere. One day he drove four hours north on 101 to Florence and four hours back, the same day, just to preview a route he already knows he'll travel eventually. He was surprised to find three of those hours held no ocean at all — the highway swerves inland, mountains or something, some kind of features — and only later, on a map, did he see the shape of it and understand. He turned around just before the coastline returned. What he has fallen in love with is the southern stretch: Brookings, Gold Beach, Port Orford, Bandon. Beaches, beach dogs, people. And a game he cannot account for the origin of — walking the tide line, tracing the waves, going out as the water goes out and walking outward as it comes in, earbuds in, music going, sometimes miscalculating badly enough that he has to run his ass off, laughing. Rivers making love to the ocean, because that is what it looks like from down there. Seals surfacing in the river like little submarine men, looking at him, going under, coming up somewhere else, looking at him again.
I have just been claimed by this place and I claimed it right back. And then, in the same breath, the refusal: he is not staying. He needs movement. He loves the adventure he has built for himself and that is never stopping. The love and the departure are not in tension. He sets the terms for the comment section before opening it — comments stay open, and if you say something dumb you'll hear from him, and you won't like it, because you're not just talking to anybody. Whatever he shares will be different, because he is different. I have fully integrated myself now. Then the qualifier again, unresolved and deliberate: so yeah, maybe. I honestly don't know. I guess you could say I'm testing the waters.
The footage cuts to the summit. Fog and rain and wind, and somewhere below all of that atmosphere, the ocean, barely visible, which he points at anyway — that's the ocean down there. Four and a half miles in an hour and a half, and he notes it with mild surprise because he wasn't racing. His watch says almost 1,700 feet. It is cold and he did not bring his coat, only a light rain jacket in the backpack that will not keep him warm, and he says so and stays. I am more alive than I have ever been in my life, except when I was a kid. Awake, open — to possibility, to experience, to romance, to connection, to friendship. This is what it means to be alive.
Then Cape Sebastian, and the moment of almost walking past it. He'd gone a mile down the trail the day before and turned back, having hiked a mountain the day before that, and told himself he'd return. He returns. The descent is steep enough that the rope makes immediate, obvious sense once he's on it — that is so cool — and the phone camera cannot hold what he's seeing, and he says that too. A perfect moment in a perfect spot. At the bottom there is a whole beach and no one else on it. He is going to go hang out. Favorite place on Earth. No idea what he's doing today yet, kind of knows, and the day is just getting started.